Transcription of Melissa Smith for the show Building Maine Businesses #294
Lisa Belisle: It’s my great pleasure today to speak with Melissa Smith, who is the President and CEO of WEX, located in South Portland. I actually don’t often get to do a husband and wife separate interviews, but I interviewed Brian Corcoran, your husband, back in May of 2015. So now I feel like we’re just doing the full circle, the whole family thing.
Melissa Smith: Yeah. And he had a great time.
Lisa Belisle: Oh I’m glad to hear that!
Melissa Smith: No, he did. He had a great time. He appreciated the interview and had fun.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I love the fact that the both of you…. Welcome in, by the way.
Melissa Smith: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Lisa Belisle: Thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule, because I know that time is at a premium these days with all that’s going on in your life. I think I’m most interested in what WEX actually does. I’ve done a lot of reading on your company and I am very impressed with the numbers. You just hit a billion dollars, which is amazing. You’re one of three companies, that we know of, within the state. There’s cards, financial, there’s travel, there’s health.
Melissa Smith: There’s a bunch of urban legends around what WEX does….
Lisa Belisle: Okay. Good.
Melissa Smith: I think it’s kind of funny. Rob and I were talking about that recently, about all the different ways that people think we do business, but the simplest version is everyone we do business with is a business in some way, shape, or form. And what we’re trying to do is take where payment, technology, and data intersect. That’s a place that we create value and it’s probably easiest to give examples of it.
So if you were to go on, you were to book a hotel room and you were to book that with Priceline or Expedia or virtually any online travel agency, you would pay that hotel with your consumer credit card. But when all the hotels in the world get paid, they’re paid behind the scenes with a virtual card that’s generated by WEX. In that case, we’re integrated into the online travel agency’s systems in a way that creates a lot of efficiency for them when they make a payment, because often a consumer is paying them two or three months in advance. When you go there, you may have a bad experience and you want to actually get a refund of your money. So for them to track that created a mass of people. What we did is we went in and said, “There’s a simpler way of doing that. Let’s do that all electronically behind the scenes.” And that’s a part of our business that has grown tremendously over the last 10 years. So that’s one example.
Other examples for us; if you were an employee with the federal government and you have a vehicle that you are using for commercial purposes, then you would have a WEX card. And that WEX card would enable you to buy fuel and there would be a series of controls around that that would make sure that you weren’t filling up your family car. And depending on who that customer is, and some of those are really small businesses, some are really big businesses, they want higher levels of controls and sophistication. And what we try to do is tailor that to whatever the customer wants.
Another example, if you are working for a company and you have a tax-deferred account, like an HSA account or an FSA account, we provide technology that’s used in order for you to track all of the expenses that you’re using on that account. So everything we’re doing is heavily behind the scenes, which is why I think people don’t really understand what we do, but at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is just make something that is facilitating a payment. We’re trying to make that as simple, as easy as possible, for the business so they can focus on growing.
Lisa Belisle: This is a big evolution from, what was it, the late 1800’s when this whole company began as Ride Express, and the focus was on coal.
Melissa Smith: Coal.
Lisa Belisle: I mean it seems like that’s a fairly straightforward thing that we can all understand. And now more than a hundred years later, you’re doing something somewhat related to transportation, but in many other ways not related at all.
Melissa Smith: It’s been really interesting history, if you look back on the company because I would say we’re more of a descendant of A.R. Wright. So family company, coal company, and one of the children had an idea, which was really how to facilitate an electronic payment. And I think back then when people were paying with fuel, had all those manual receipts, and they just wanted to make that simpler.
That was the original concept and there was a lot of work that went in behind the scenes to make sure that you got acceptance and any of the payment companies like WEX, getting acceptance is a really big barrier. So they spent a number of years, the company was founded in 1983, and then it became venture-backed in 1985, and it didn’t make money until 1993. So you might imagine that was a long period of many different rounds of funding and then from that point forward, I started in 1997 and there were five ownership changes in the next five-ish years.
So a lot of different corporate parents, a lot of different changes at that level. But one of the things that’s been great is that this company has continued to grow and thrive, despite what was happening and kind of the dramatic backdrop until we went public in 2005. That’s when we really decided we claimed our independence and we became much more secure in the future of the company.
Lisa Belisle: And this is important to the state of Maine because you currently have 750 Maine people who are employed here, and it’s important around the world because you have 2,700 employees. So all of the things that you just described are making it possible for lots of people to make a living.
Melissa Smith: Yeah, when I think about the company, one of the things that I think a lot about is we’ve got employees, and I have this visual of all the employees that are around the world, and then all their families that are attached to them. So we have, I think, quite a bit of impact and that’s a great responsibility.
The fun part of being in a growth company is you create opportunity too. So you have the careers of the people that are working there, but if the company continues to grow, a great example, you create opportunity for people and because it grows it changes every few years and so it feels a little bit different as the core.
The company, who we are, I say, is very similar to it has been in 20 years, but when we went public that made us very different, and when we became global that made it very different. I would say in steps, when we first went into something that was global it was in Australia, so English speaking, time zone differences, but not a huge difference, but now we’re doing business throughout Europe. We have an office in Singapore, we have an office in Brazil, where you get into countries that are not English speaking as their primary language and it changed the fiber of the business and the company, but it also made it richer. So I think as an employee, you get to now work with people all over the world and you experience things in a different way, which I think is a really additive way.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that this is happening with WEX at the same time as we were all becoming aware of this whole global citizenship idea. What your company has gone through is really kind of reflective of the changing times.
Melissa Smith: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think you can get insular in many ways and you think about what you see everyday is the best and then you can go into a totally different market where people experience life in a very different way.
When you go into Brazil, safety is really experienced in a different way for the people that live there. As a result, their products are built with that much more forefront in their mind. So I think it’s interesting as you go from one region to another you realize that the United States, while it is very important, it’s not the same experience that’s happening around the world and yet at the same time you’re competing in many ways on a global basis, and it’s something that I think is really important.
We have offices in 10 different countries, we have 37 offices. So we think about how we compete for talent, we think about it globally. We think about Maine and how it competes on a global level and how important that is, because the companies that we’re competing against are global companies, and they can shift employees into different regions of the world or really pick up on innovation in different parts of the world in a way that we also have to be thinking about. So I think of that as a big positive but also something that we have to be more thoughtful about as we’ve gotten bigger and gone into more of that global world.
Lisa Belisle: And your husband, Brian Corcoran, his Shamrock Sports also has definitely national and perhaps really international interests as well. So that’s an interesting thing. I mean, they’re different types of industry certainly and his is a smaller business, but it must create lots of kind of fascinating conversations in that-
Melissa Smith: Yeah, our dinner conversations are probably different than most peoples’. I think what Brian does is so fascinating to me probably because it’s so very different. Most people don’t think about the business of sports and that’s the world that he lives in and at the same time he gets to experience these really fun events.
So there’s a fun part of what he does, there’s a really hard part of what he does, because his business is largely about selling and that’s a difficult part of the business to be in. But at the same time, he gets to go to some pretty amazing events and I’ve been able to go to some of those with him. I’ve been able to go to the Olympics in London and I’ve been to the Kentucky Derby, and I can go on and on about different things that we’ve done over the years that we’ve been together.
What he likes about that is the pride in the event, because at the end of the day someone is deciding to sponsor that and you want to make sure that the people who go are entertained, that they have a good experience, and often these are world class events and one of the things he’s been passionate about is bringing some of those to Maine, which is a great way to create economic development.
Lisa Belisle: You grew up in a pretty small town.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: I’m not really sure even where it is because I read-
Melissa Smith: It’s not on the map?
Lisa Belisle: Because I read the name of it and I was like, “Oh I’ve been to the county a lot but I’ve….” So where did you grow up?
Melissa Smith: I grew up in Winn, Maine, which is about an hour north of Bangor. It’s in Penobscot County, but the Northern part of Penobscot County. I grew up on a farm, so middle of nowhere. I think there were 450 people in my hometown. There was no traffic lights. Everybody knows everybody. It’s a great place to grow up. We grew up with animals, so we had horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, you name it.
I think some of the things you learn from growing up in a small town, you learn the importance of community because everybody has to really participate. There really isn’t an option. I also think that growing up in that part of Maine, there’s a lot of poverty there and I think that’s in many ways a good way to grow up. I know it’s going to sound wrong, but I think I grew up very grounded in what you need and what you want and that those are two different things in life. The people that I grew up with are incredibly happy, fulfilled, and that’s without lots of material things, and I think that is an important part.
Now living in Southern Maine, it’s in many ways a very different experience than the Maine that I really understood and grew up with when I first started.
Lisa Belisle: And there were three of you? Three kids?
Melissa Smith: I come with one of those nontraditional families. So there are three girls. My mother married somebody, my mother remarried when I was five and she married somebody that had five children. We were the Brady Bunch, so three of his children, his three younger ones, and us three girls lived together. His two older ones were old enough on their own that they didn’t ever live with us.
So there were six kids and, like I said, all kinds of animals. I’m used to chaos in my life, that’s why I’m pretty good with chaos, but again great. My stepfather was a very important part of my life. He unfortunately passed away a little over a year ago, but he’s been in my life since I was two years old. So really he’s been the rock in my life. He also taught me how important it is how men treat women, because he was so great to my mother. He adored her, which was a wonderful thing to see growing up.
Lisa Belisle: I would guess that in addition to the small town sense of community, growing up in a household of six there’s also- and you said you grew up on a farm-
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: So there’s shared responsibilities sort of all the way around.
Melissa Smith: Yes. Well it’s interesting because my mother had this philosophy on children and so she had this balance of giving us a lot of freedom to have fun and at the same time there was kind of this stick of responsibility that was always in the background. But she wanted to make sure there was some of each.
So we all had responsibilities and there’s things like, as a family we’d bring in hay every year. Bringing in hay meant I drove a big huge old hay truck when I was literally just old enough to see over the wheel. What I learned from that is when you dumped the hay truck you had to reload it yourself. So you learn pretty quickly that you had to do it well otherwise you’re going to redo it. Then when the next sibling got to that point, you kind of get kicked out and then you had to actually load the truck.
So you had this kind of order of how things happened. We learned pretty quickly to bring all our friends with us and make it into this big party. So you made the work as fast and as easy as possible and fun. So there’s things like that, bring in wood, they were rights of passage I guess, if you will. Being a part of living there that you had to contribute. But we also got to ride horses and do a lot of fun things. It wasn’t all work.
Lisa Belisle: How did the University of Maine prepare you academically to do what you’re doing now?
Melissa Smith: That’s a great question. My mother went to the University of Maine, my grandmother went to the University of Maine. Ironically they went about the same time. So when it came for me to go to school, my first economic lesson was my mother sitting down and saying, “Honey you can go to school anywhere you want in the world and lets do the math or you can go to the University of Maine.” My mom worked there so I could go relatively inexpensively.
I think at that time that I was interested in spreading my wings a little bit more but it became more of a financial consideration, but I feel like I got a really great education. I think for me when I first went there, I knew I wanted to study business but I didn’t know really what that meant. Because you don’t really get a lot of exposure when you grow up in a small town of what the options even are.
My first year I was taking some accounting classes and I used to get these notes back from the accounting professor that would say, “You should consider this to be your major.” And I thought, “How boring is that!” You know, like, accounting really? Then he started talking to me and he started talking to me about what public accounting was like and how that’s different. You actually get to go and travel and see how different companies work. He kind of led me there in many ways in a series of a few years.
So even though I went to a school that has a large number of students, it didn’t feel that way in many ways. I think that I was really lucky he became one of my first mentors and really had a lot to do with what I chose to do and really set me into going into public accounting, which I felt like was a really good experience.
And I would advocate that for any child growing up, because almost immediately you learn how to deal with people because you have to deal with customers. You’re sent out into the field and you work with customers. You work with different peers constantly and you almost immediately start supervising within the first couple of years. So then you learn how to actually understand that not everybody is the same and their ability to learn and how they’re going to succeed is very different and in order for you to be successful you have to be able really adapt to their individual needs. So I feel like that was a really good experience for me just out of school.
But I think University of Maine actually heavily prepared me for that and I felt like some of that was the experience I had with one of my professors.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been a big proponent of early and well done STEM education within the state of Maine, and education in general. Is this because you just generally have a love of the state of Maine? Is this because you have more considered interest in getting people to be highly educated so that you could get them to WEX? Or both?
Melissa Smith: It’s both. STEM related fields are interesting to me because I understand how much more earnings capacity you create if you go into one of those fields. And there’s a practicality associated with going into those fields that sometimes feels like it’s missing and at the same time WEX as an employer is heavily dependent on our ability to track talent in those fields. So the jobs that we’re adding, we’ll add over a hundred in Maine this year, will be largely STEM related. So they’re either going to be in the technology areas, some of them in the finance areas. So I think it’s important.
I also think that as we compete for talent globally that Maine has to really think about how we transform our ability to really develop talent, which starts with education and then retain talent. I think it’s a big issue for us and it’s something that we see as we’re out into the market place. So there’s a little bit that’s a passion point for me around making sure that the state is thriving, it’s really important to me. It’s been a great state to grow up in. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of benefit from living here and I want to make sure I give back to that.
But also there’s the more practical part of it, as an employer headquartered here, there’s certain disadvantages and I want to make sure that we really do something about that. And I feel like we have so much opportunity there. We are located central to one of the largest economies in the world with the whole Boston Hub. We have a great quality of life.
When I go out into the marketplace and recruit people to come live here, people are increasingly interested in what we have to offer. When they come and live here, they never go back. I have yet to have someone come and relocate here and say, “I’ve made a mistake. I want to move my family away from here.” It’s the opposite, it’s “I really have roots here.” Often what I’ll hear, almost universally, when they bring children, they talk about how it just creates a settling feeling. Not that they’re not going to have high expectations in their school but they lose a little bit of the social pressure that they’re having in some other regions. At WEX I feel like we work just as hard as if they were some place else but they spend less time commuting. So they have a higher quality of life as a result. So there’s a lot to offer in the state and I think Portland in particular has really just blossomed in the period of time that I’ve lived in this area.
Lisa Belisle: So, the issue of children is interesting, because you just came back, or are transitioning back….
Melissa Smith: I’m back.
Lisa Belisle: You’re back.
Melissa Smith: I’m back.
Lisa Belisle: You’re back. You’re here…. from the birth of your twins.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: And your son, Baxter, is now two?
Melissa Smith: Two and a half.
Lisa Belisle: Two and half.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: So you have, currently, eleven week old twins.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: And Baxter.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: So, the idea of family and raising a family in a family friendly atmosphere is very important to you.
Melissa Smith: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Belisle: Do you think it’s easier to have the type of partnership that you have with your husband in the state of Maine, or in this part of the world, than it might be in other places?
Melissa Smith: Well, definitely when you broaden it to the world, then I think that we’re lucky in many ways to live in the United States. I feel like as a woman to live in the United States, and actually in Maine, to have the career that I have, I feel like that’s a piece of it.
I think that Brian is a great partner and he enables me to do what I need to do and vice versa. We really think of this as a partnership and how we’re going to help each other out and at the same time we rely pretty heavily on our extended family. We’re very lucky, my mother, as an example, stayed here for the winter. She would normally go to Arizona for the winter. So she’s been forefront, working with us, his parents are very actively involved.
So we are relying on the nucleus of our family and that’s been important, but I don’t know if I were to say Maine versus some other part of the country, I don’t know that that’s different. I do think that there’s a little bit of benefit as a woman in my career being in Maine and I think that there’s a little bit of that independence thing that we have here that I think plays well into that. But I certainly do think if I compare other places in the world I could be living, this is a much more beneficial place. I also think Maine is one of those places that allow independence, which helps Brian with his business and so I think that there’s probably a whole series of things coming together that are helpful to us.
Lisa Belisle: I understand that you just instituted a family leave for eight weeks, paid, after the birth of a child, within WEX. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Melissa Smith: Six weeks.
Lisa Belisle: Six weeks.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Okay.
Melissa Smith: Yes. Yep.
Lisa Belisle: Still very generous.
Melissa Smith: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly. So, what prompted that?
Melissa Smith: I feel like it’s in the category to do the right thing. When I started looking at the ways that leave is considered around the world, it’s a place that the United States is largely lagging compared to the rest of the developed world. So it felt like a trend that was coming to us and I’d rather be on the front part of that trend because again I feel like it’s the right thing to do.
And for us, the fact that we’re giving leave out and that we’re agnostic if it’s the male or the female partner in whatever it happens to be that we wanted to make sure that we’re thoughtful about that. That I felt strong about too is that I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t really designed to think about things in a an old fashioned way, it was really more representative of the way things work now. It’s been actually great. That’s one of those fun parts of my job, when you do something like that and you get notes back from people that give you personal stories about how that decision affected their lives. It’s incredibly satisfying. I think, again, we’ll see more businesses make that trend over time in the United States, because I think that we’re just lagging with how people think about this on a more global basis.
Lisa Belisle: For people who are thinking about what their next career step might be, what do you think WEX has to offer?
Melissa Smith: Oh WEX has so much to offer. You know, I start with the things that the former CEO, who actually had recruited me, the things he said to me I think are still true. He said it’s the type of place that an individual can make a difference, which was incredibly appealing to me, and that your performance affects your trajectory.
I think we’re at these great stages as a business where we’re not so small that we’re worried about whether or not we’re going to make payroll, but we’re not so big, even at a billion dollars of revenue, that it’s hard to move. So I like the phase that we’re in, I like the global interaction. The jobs that we have, you can really see this coming through our employee satisfaction surveys, they’re interesting work that people are doing, they feel like they’re making a difference.
We have a great culture, our culture is really founded on the idea of not just what you do but how you do it, and we reward people with what we call a President’s Club trip every year. This year we picked 45 people, so highly selective, think 2,700 employees but 45 people went. Anybody in the company can nominate anybody else and we pick it based on what they do and how they do it, which means it can’t all be about sharp elbows, they actually have to do things in a more collaborative way. Then we take them and whoever they choose to go with them onto a trip someplace, this year we announced we’re going to Portugal. I feel like that’s embedded in who the company is in a cultural perspective and it’s been true before I started and it’s part of what I want to make sure that we continue to foster. There really is a relationship-orientation in the company that I think is really great.
Lisa Belisle: Well it’s been a pleasure. I think we can probably fill a few different hours talking about this, because I think you’re doing really interesting things.
Melissa Smith: Well thank you.
Lisa Belisle: I really appreciate the time that you’re taking to come and talk to me today and anybody who is listening. I encourage people to look into WEX if that’s something that you think would be a good fit in your life.
Melissa Smith: Www.wexinc.com.
Lisa Belisle: I love it. That’s great. And also we will be featuring Melissa in an upcoming issue of Old Port Magazine, so you can also read the profile there. I’ve been speaking with Melissa Smith who is the President and CEO of WEX, Inc., located in South Portland. Keep up the good work. Thank you.
Melissa Smith: Thank you. Thank you.