Reinventing the Razor & Razorblades Model by Focusing on Subscriber Outcomes
Talking with Anthony Napolitano of HP’s Instant Ink
Subscription commerce (physical products delivered on a recurring basis for a fixed price) is hard, and I’m surprised by how many entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs underestimate the challenges.
These “subscription box” and “subscribe & save” type businesses are even more complex than their pure-digital subscription counterparts (content, software, services). In addition to the usual challenges around balancing acquisition, engagement and retention, subscription commerce entrepreneurs have to deal with shipping, returns and inventory management, as well as the challenges of fixed pricing with variable costs.
Anthony Napolitano, VP and General Manager of HP’s Instant Ink Subscription Service is an expert on building, scaling and operationalizing a subscription commerce business. He also knows about how to build subscription capabilities inside a large and mostly episodic organization. I recently talked with Anthony about his role as an intrapreneur, and what it’s like to be the subscription guy in a transactional business. In this wide ranging interview, we cover running a physical subscription business, ensuring customers get full value from their subscriptions, and managing a business in times of change.
The following interview is adapted from my podcast, Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches.
Robbie Baxter: How did you come to run Instant Ink? Looking back, would you say it was inevitable? Or are you surprised at where you’ve ended up?
Anthony Napolitano: Well, I’m thrilled at where I ended up. I can’t say it was fully planned and chartered for sure. I think each of us have sometimes at our career we make a specific choice and sometimes luck falls upon you and you look back and are grateful that it happened. Most of my career I’ve spent in what we call startup businesses inside of HP. These are new businesses that we’re trying to create and grow. And it just so happened to be that before I joined Instant Ink, I was in another startup business inside of HP. This was a unique experience, in that I was there from day one until we actually shut down the business. I was in that business for 12 years. And while it didn’t succeed in kind of a commercial sense, I learned a lot from that business. But because I had that experience, Instant Ink at the time was really only a few hundred thousand customers. And so I had this reputation of being able to grow new businesses inside of HP and I was given the opportunity to come into Instant Ink. Now we have over seven million customers worldwide.
Robbie Baxter: How many customers was that?
Anthony Napolitano: Seven million.
Robbie Baxter: Three hundred thousand to seven million.
Anthony Napolitano: That’s right. In the last five plus years.
Robbie Baxter: Now, it’s interesting to me that you’re you’re really an entrepreneur, and yet you’ve spent most of your career inside a big established company. What has that been like for you?
Anthony Napolitano: It’s been fantastic. I mean, I joined HP right out of business school, didn’t have much experience coming into HP. And so I thought, let me get a big name under my belt and then perhaps, move on to other companies. But here it is 23 years later, and I am still at HP and still really enjoying it because there are so many benefits you get in a large company. In terms of trying new opportunities, we’re international. I’ve been in so many different businesses inside of HP, but around fifteen, sixteen years ago, I really fell in love with this idea of being able to create a legacy. HP has such a great legacy already, but perhaps I can take one of these businesses and have it become part of the future of the company. Instant Ink has turned out to be something that I really believe the company is fully behind. And I believe five or ten years from now, I’ll be able to say I was a part of making that happen. That is really motivating for me.
Robbie Baxter: Let’s talk about Instant Ink. Instant Ink is Hewlett-Packard’s Subscription Ink service for their printers. So you buy an HP printer and then you subscribe to the ink cartridges. Can you explain the logic behind building out that model and kind of how it fits with HP, and its bigger promise to their customers?
Anthony Napolitano: Absolutely. It really started with trying to solve pain points that our customers have with printing, and they are clear with us on what those issues are. One is that the cost of ink is too high. And the other, which is equally as painful, that while people don’t print nearly as much as they used to, when they do print, they need the output. I need a report. I need my child’s homework printed. And lo and behold, I’m out of ink right at that time.
Robbie Baxter: Yeah, we’ve had that experience at our house.
Anthony Napolitano: Once or twice. So that was really what we saw as the problem that we went to go set out to solve it. We also started looking externally and saw more and more industries moving towards as-a-service. Whatever it is as a service, we saw subscription really transforming industries. And so we felt we were the leader in consumer print. It’s much better for us to be the ones writing the rules of how this should be played in the print business. We are able to solve customer problems as well as continue our leadership in this space. We’re the ones doing the disruption versus reacting to it by an outside player.
Robbie Baxter: I talk a lot about this concept of a forever promise and how in so many cases the customer doesn’t want a printer. They want to be able to print. Your subscription is not about the services. You talked about “as a service”, which is very much in vogue, software as a service, product as a service. It’s actually the delivery of the ink, it’s a subscription to a physical product. That’s an operational challenge. And that’s one step beyond most subscriptions, like the Spotifys, the streaming content that many of us subscribe to. What kind of challenges do you have that, let’s say a Spotify or a Salesforce doesn’t need to deal with?
Anthony Napolitano: That’s a great question. It’s a physical product that’s not just time-based. It’s not based on every 30 days you get something, or you set the delivery. It is truly based on your consumption. So it sounds very simple, right? It’s even more complex and more of an investment. And frankly, why I think it’s been so successful is that you’re buying the outcome. You’re not buying the consumable to create the outcome. The outcome is your report or your photo or presentation. We have to do a lot to ensure that you get that ink before you run out. That is our promise. There is so much security and knowledge that goes into the printers themselves, to the cartridges themselves, to the connection to the cloud. Then there’s the algorithm that determines, based on your frequency and usage, when we need to ship you something. We ship it to you in a box that’s just for you, Robbie. It’s not a box for just anyone, it is based on your personalized and individual consumption.
Robbie Baxter: But what you’re talking is complex, because what’s actually going in the box is unique and the cadence of delivery is also unique. It creates a lot of challenges on the operations side. And I saw that you have a background in operations, which isinteresting. I don’t see a lot of subscription entrepreneurs with that kind of a background, but it might be a super secret super power.
Anthony Napolitano: I don’t know if I ever thought about it like that. I think it goes back a little bit to what I was mentioning before about HP. I do have a varied background from finance. I even started in finance and I do have many years in operations. And then the last eight years have been in general management. I think you need to have a little bit of everything to truly be effective as a leader of an organization from an end to end perspective. But you said it absolutely right. It is a complexity. Right, for sure. That’s been that has been added. But it’s also been part of our value prop and it’s also been a barrier to entry. As of today, we’re the only ones in the in the printing space that have a consumer subscription because it is it does take innovation. It does take investment to make it.
Robbie Baxter: So an entrepreneur, is someone working on their own independently to launch something new. An Intrapreneur with an “I”, is somebody serving in an entrepreneurial function, but within a larger company the way Anthony does. I think both groups often underestimate the importance of operations of supply chain of process of how you do the distribution and how important those are to providing the value for the consumer. There’s a lot of emphasis on marketing and on what’s inside the box. You know, the curation as opposed to the full range of sources of value that you can provide to the customer.
Anthony Napolitano: Right. I mean, you can have all the marketing bells and whistles, but if you can’t execute on what your promise is, then you either are not going to acquire customers or you are not going to retain them. Both of those things are part of your value proposition. It’s difficult to get people to join. Sometimes it’s even more difficult to get them to stay. So I really view that operational muscle. You talk about a physical product as key to that. And again, that’s one of the main benefits of being an intrapreneur. I love the way that, as you said, I do get access to all of the scale and all of the muscle that HP has to offer.
Robbie Baxter: I want to ask you about the scale and muscle of of HP. And I also want to ask you about the metrics you use. I’m going to ask about metrics first and then I want to make sure we talk about your relationship within the larger organization. So in terms of the metrics that you use on your dashboard to know if the if the business is healthy, what are the most important attributes that you’re looking at to kind of diagnose where the problems are or anticipate opportunities for the future?
Anthony Napolitano: I think especially an intrapreneur or even entrepreneur, the metrics change over time. What you’re measuring at your early life, is do we even have a customer value proposition? It is different from when you are operating at scale. You always have to keep an eye on the value prop and ensure that you’re curating it. It’s really important that leaders of these organizations are flexible and have the right metrics in place. For us, some of the key metrics that we use is it is a term that we call adoption, which is basically the number of customers that sign up divided by printers sold, for example. So that’s a key metric that we use because it basically tells us out of one hundred people that are buying a printer, how many are we inviting in and successfully inviting in to come into the service from an operational perspective? That’s the one I key in on the most. I want to see improvement quarter over quarter and year on year. That’s the one where I see printer sales could be up or down, but the percentage of people that sign up is my key metric because it’s really talking about if we are speaking to the customer in the right way. Then we look at gross enrollees. Cumulative enrollees are key metrics. And then on that, I’d say on the back end we look at churn and reasons for churn. Those are the key metrics, beyond the profit and loss financial metrics, of course.
Robbie Baxter: So if I if I were coming in as a consultant or I were trying to guess what goes on in your business, I would be thinking about if there were problems. I would say, well, if you’re not if you’re not enrolling people, it’s probably either they don’t understand, they don’t know that it exists. They don’t understand what the value is or they don’t believe it’s as good as you say.
Anthony Napolitano: You got it right. It’s one of those three things.
Robbie Baxter: So those would be kind of three things where you’d be tracking and you’d be taking different actions depending on those three. And then if you want to track engagement and retention, I would be trying to understand why people are leaving. Are they leaving because they think it didn’t work as it was promised? In other words, it’s an operational problem. You said I was never going to run out of ink, but I’ve run out of ink twice. What’s up with that? You’re not delivering on your promise or you delivered on your promise, but I don’t need it anymore because I’m no longer printing. I’m back at work now and I don’t need my home printer the way I used to or I found a different solution for my printing needs. Or I think that I can get my printing done more cheaply or more efficiently in some other way.
Anthony Napolitano: There’s no mystery as to why people leave, because we have a relationship directly with customers. We get all the data right. Typically what people say they don’t see the value. In our case, what they’re saying is it’s either I’m not printing as much as I used to, but yet I’m paying. Or the other one, which is a little more challenging to solve, is I’m not getting shipments of ink all the time. Because we don’t ship every month, we ship when you need it. So how do we educate customers that they are getting value when they’re not physically getting something?
Robbie Baxter: This is a problem that a lot of physical businesses have where they say, we’re charging you every month, but we’re only delivering maybe every quarter. So do we charge quarterly? But then it’s a bigger number. Do we charge only when we deliver? But then that not only is that a bigger number, but it also might make your customer think of it as a transaction. I pay you. You make a shipment. I pay you. And what you’re saying is, look, if we need to make three shipments in a quarter, we’ll do that. If we need to make one shipment in six months. We’ll do that. But our promise to you is that you’re not going to run out of ink.
Anthony Napolitano: Exactly right. Now it’s about the touch points that you have in that interim to educate the customer that they are still seeing value, even though I’m not getting that physical product? You said it exactly right, Robbie. We don’t want to charge you every time we ship you something, because now all we’re doing is automating a transactional process. And that’s not the value, we don’t want you thinking about ink anymore. We want you to think about printing pages. And frankly, we want you to print color beautiful pages. You want to print eight by eleven, beautiful full bleed photos? Go for it. And part of the reason we want that is because an inkjet printer, which is what we predominately are selling, the beauty of it is the full photo color. That’s the emotional connection that you have with the printer, is when you see a loved one or a family or a place that you want to go visit again.
Robbie Baxter: And I bet your photo expertise is coming into play here. I talk about this idea of a best member. You’re sort of describing a best member as somebody who fully uses the potential of your printer. So somebody who’s just printing a lot of words and then, you know, like a writer might not be getting as much value as somebody who is maybe an artist or maybe really interested in their family photos and constantly printing beautiful images. So knowing who your best member is is really helpful, both on acquisition and on engagement and retention, because it gives you some guidance on which features to add as your customers are asking for all kinds of features. You can focus on these are the features that are going to be most valuable to the kind of people that you are optimized to serve best.
Anthony Napolitano: Absolutely right. I mean, the two things you need to be able to do, what you just described is a laser focus on your customer and what they are telling you and the data. Everyone says customer first. No, you have to believe that you are solving a problem. In any business, let alone subscription, where you can cancel anytime and literally your customers are electing to stay with you on a billing cycle, the urgency is through the roof. So you have to have that mentality of continuing to solve problems. The data is going to guide you and allow you to be able to do that in a real fundamental way.
Robbie Baxter: One of the challenges companies have when they’re launching a subscription business is where they have actual variable costs. Is the worry about how are people going to use this. If this is a buffet? Are they all going to head towards the caviar? And what’s so interesting to me is that your model is based on attracting caviar lovers.
Anthony Napolitano: That’s exactly right. The way we design the program and the way the pricing is set is that the more you print, the more you save. We want to encourage print relevancy. That’s the term we use internally to describe how customers use their printer. So that is how the program was set up. The more you print, the more you save. People want to know they’re getting a good deal. People want the promise of what the service provides. But by and large, if they feel like they’re getting those things, they’re going to set it and forget it. That’s not a negative thing. We are fulfilling the promise when someone isn’t checking on the billing period. What they tell us is we removed the chore from their life. They’re saying they don’t have to think about ink anymore. We call it convenience. It’s like, how much would you pay for someone to do your laundry? I don’t personally like doing laundry. Maybe you do. I don’t know. But, what if you could pay five bucks a month for someone to take that chore off of your list?
Robbie Baxter: Last year, I spoke at the AOCS conference, the (American) Oil Chemists Society Conference, and, I hadn’t realized this, but those are the people who make soap and detergents. One of the things we were talking about, was that people who wash clothes don’t want to wash clothes. They want to have clean, beautiful things to wear in their closet. The way that I do that is by going downstairs to our laundry room and throwing stuff in the washing machine or bringing it to the dry cleaners or whatever I have to do. That’s how I do it now, because I want clean clothes in my closet. But if there were a better, easier way, if there were little fairies that came into my closet and whisked away the stains. That’s what I would like. And so for organizations listening and thinking about this, it’s really valuable to take a step back and say what goal is my customer trying to achieve while they’re using my product? Where do I fall short in helping them achieve it?
Anthony Napolitano: In my case, it’s ink. Now I have to go out and think about it. People accept that that’s the way they have to do it. They cope with that’s the way they have to do it. But organizations shouldn’t accept that that’s the best way to do it. And I think that’s extremely challenging for companies who are built by the success of that traditional business to really have the foresight to realize we have to change for our long term survival. And that’s why I give HP a lot of credit. Right. We’ve built a franchise on people buying ink by transaction. We’re the best at it. We’ve had that for 30 years. We’re number one in the market and have been forever. But we had the foresight five, six years ago that now we have to give the customers choice because they’re telling us they want a different way. We have been the ones really leading that trend transformation, as we talked about earlier. That’s not always the case.
Robbie Baxter: Do your customers, when when they you know, so I buy my printer. I sign up for Instant Ink. Do I have to be onboarded?
Anthony Napolitano: That is a good question. The time that we get people to sign up for the services is typically when they’re setting up their printer. Typically, like if you got a Nest device, at that time they’ll say, create an account, and here’s things that you could buy and subscribe to. So that similar IOT, Internet-of-things, kind of experience is when you’re setting up the printer. There’s a delicate balance that you know you want to educate the customer, but you don’t want to inundate them. They are trying to set up the printer or set up the IOT device. Offer them something of value, but be crisp in what you’re offering. And then if they want to find out more, they can find out more. We really try to be clear with customers about the value they’re getting, which is savings and never running out of ink. We know that’s the value proposition that resonates. There are places to learn more, and then we do the onboarding. Once you’re enrolled, then we’ll send you communications. It says, here’s basically all the value that you just bought. You didn’t even realize it.
Robbie Baxter: What I found is that the first thing you described, getting people to sign up is very traditional marketing. But the onboarding, that is for somebody who is already paying for your service. The onus is on the organization to make sure they get value. If I buy a new car and I roll it off the showroom floor and I never take it out of first gear and I never see what it can do, that’s my problem. I already wrote a big check. But if I sign up for Instant Ink and I only use it for a few pages of black and white print every month, I’m going to cancel. So it’s not enough for you to just get me to sign up. That moment of transaction is only a starting point. You have to think about how to onboard me so that I do the behaviors that are going to get me the most value, because if I’m not getting the value I’m paying for, I’m going to cancel.
Anthony Napolitano: It’s extremely shortsighted to view people in, let’s say, the wrong plan or not using your service, to think that’s a great customer. Because I’m not spending any money or, you know, that is…
Robbie Baxter: The person who joins but doesn’t go to the gym.
Anthony Napolitano: Exactly. They don’t go to the gym. OK, but guess what happens right after? You know, March 1st when I have gone to the gym for two weeks, what happens? I probably cancel. So I mean, you’re absolutely right. You will have the best success when 1) you’ve created something that actually has value and 2) customers take advantage of that value. You have to educate them how to get as much of that value as they can. You don’t want to automatically do things for customers. They want to be in control. But you’re saying educate them in terms of what’s available.
Robbie Baxter: This is onboarding and this is part of the principle behind customer success. Educate them about the value that they’re entitled to. It’s not about upselling. It’s about ensuring that they’re making the most of what they are paying for. It can feel counterintuitive for organizations to encourage people to use what they’ve already paid for. Let’s go back to this question of being in an intrapreneur inside a big company. Not only is HP transactional, but they’re used to making pretty big transactions. You’re buying a durable good. What’s it been like being the subscription guy in a transactional business?
Anthony Napolitano: What does it take for us to be successful and as successful as we have been? And, you know, I think some of the key success factors to enable it to happen. And I think it really had to start at the top. You need champions, you need folks who are setting, put a stake in the ground and say this is the direction that we need to head.
Robbie Baxter: You definitely need a leadership champion.
Anthony Napolitano: Absolutely need it. Now for us, what we had to prove to that champion was that we had the value prop. That was the sole focus. The idea was, if we can speak one-on-one, can we get a high percentage of you to sign up for the service? That was when we did pilots early on. All we were testing was, can we create a service that if you had perfect awareness, which we know is not true in the world, that we could get people to sign up for the service? Once we had that, then we needed to figure out now how the business model can work for HP. And that’s really counter to ways that I’ve seen programs start by trying to solve a company problem and then try to sell it to the customer. That that is not the way Instant Ink was created. It was created truly from trying to solve a customer problem. Then we tried to make it work for us. I think it’s it’s been really eye-opening for the company because we have this direct to consumer relationship where we are having twelve transactions a year versus maybe one transaction every three years. And all of the rich data and insights we can bring to the table have really just been part of our success and really the way we’ve been able to continue to garner support. For the program is really with that data and that insight.
Robbie Baxter: Are you evaluated just on the basis of the success of your Instant Ink business or is in your metrics or your performance reviews, are you also expected to be contributing to HP as a whole? Or to what extent are you expected to be contributing those insights, your subscription expertise and some other things that I didn’t think about to the organization as a whole strategically?
Anthony Napolitano: I’m evaluated predominantly on how my business is doing. But part of the way that we were able to build, let’s say, a coalition for change. There’s this momentum created by showing all of the benefits that we’re providing to the corporation that has nothing to do with Instant Ink P&L. We have very specific data points in how we’re helping the hardware business, how we are bringing new entrants into print, and how you know customers are printing more photos, when they’re on Instant Ink. All of those things that are that are vital for bringing the next generation customer into HP, because they want access, not ownership. The business model is critical to bringing in those customers. Those additional benefits are things that we have brought to the forefront to continue to generate that momentum to continue to invest and grow.
Robbie Baxter: I’d like to ask you for some advice for someone like you. I have a particular client right now, whose company is in a very similar position. They’re a large company, a global leader in their space. They have a product that they sell on a fairly regular cadence already, but they’re thinking about subscription. And of course, my client is the one who has been tasked to figure it out and make the case. What advice do you have for your fellow intrapreneurs who want to be subscription leaders in an organization that doesn’t really do subscription?
Anthony Napolitano: I’m sure there’s there are a lot of them.
Robbie Baxter: Especially now. They’re increasing.
Anthony Napolitano: Everyone is seeing now all the value of subscription. There are some fundamental elements that need to be in place for success. One of the things that is difficult in a big business to kind of wrap their heads around is, how the team is even structured. So I’m going to assume that some C-level person has asked this person to go figure this thing out. What I’ve seen fail is when you ask people who are responsible for the bulk of the company’s revenue to take this on as a pet project. All the people that are working on it are doing it as a ten, twenty percent part of their job. That’s a recipe for disaster, to be totally frank. You need a dedicated team. It does not to be an army, but it needs to be a dedicated team that has enough of the end to end elements and the empowerment to operate outside of the machine.
Robbie Baxter: Outside of the machine. Off and in the corner.
Anthony Napolitano: Exactly right. Sometimes that’s viewed as scary, like, some kind of shadow I.T. But we are trying to completely change everything about the way we do business. And you really need a team that twenty-four by seven, this is all they do. So to me, it starts with with that basic of a foundation. And again, it doesn’t have to be 100 people. It needs to be a dedicated team.
Robbie Baxter: So a dedicated team and off in the corner. Outside of the core shared services.
Anthony Napolitano: They need sponsorship, though, of those folks who are going to need to participate. Because if it’s just me in the corner, I am going to have to knock on a few doors. I’m not going to build my own supply chain, for example. I need to use and leverage what we have to offer. So there needs to be enough. We’re incubating. But I also can call on you when I need you. And that’s where C-level support is really critical. But then beyond that, really, don’t worry about the financial model at all. You need to start with solving the the customer’s problem. It’s not just taking what I’m doing and getting you to buy it more regularly. No, you’ve got to attack it a totally different way. What are they telling you they don’t like about the way that they’re doing it today? Then you go about solving that. Once you know what that hypothesis is, then it’s about piloting, iterating, failing, failing often, failing fast, failing without having to make tens of millions dollars investment. Create your sandlot where you can have those experiments to really guide where you need to go. That could take you a year. It could take you two years. But by the time you now know what your customer value prop is now, you’re ready to talk about how to price it. How are we going to make money? How do we scale it?
Robbie Baxter: Now that they want it, you can price it because they’re going to say, yes, I’d like that. How much is that? You’ve earned the right to that conversation.
Anthony Napolitano: Exactly right.
Robbie Baxter: I have a second question for you. We are recording during shelter in place. Things are opening up a little bit. But this has been quite an unprecedented time these last few months. What advice do you have for business owners, especially in entrepreneurial businesses, to be resilient during times like this? What have you learned?
Anthony Napolitano: So I know I talk a lot about customer value prop. If you didn’t know what your customer value prop was before, you sure do now. Because either it’s been reinforced that while you actually were solving a problem or it’s totally changed because the environment has changed. Now you need to solve another problem, or you were solving one and you’re no longer you’re really providing the value that customers need. That ability to have that interaction with your customers, have the data and the ways to get that information are true, now even more than ever, given how much changed in such a short period of time. The other thing I would say is we are treating this cohort as a very as its own cohort. We are looking at them, and if they’re behaving differently, whether they’re printing more or printing less, are they are they staying with us longer? What are they telling us?
Robbie Baxter: We talk a lot about understanding different cohorts, whether that’s all different people that subscribe for the first time in January versus June or they come through this channel versus that channel. There’s a lot of cohort analysis in the world of subscription. Somebody who comes in for a different reason in a different time is likely to behave differently. It’s important to track that, to not assume that they’re going to behave in the same way as other cohorts. And you don’t want to set expectations that, for example, they’re all going to stay if you’ve had a spike because they’re all working at home for three months but will be going back to the office. You also want to learn that so that the next time that there is some kind of unexpected spike, you have a process for setting expectations and for onboarding these unusual new subscribers.
Anthony Napolitano: And perhaps we even find that there is a new segment that we didn’t even know existed before, which is the exciting thing about all of this. They could act differently, but we could be attracting people that maybe didn’t even own a printer before. Or they did own one and for years didn’t want this Instant Ink thing. Now they want to join.
Robbie Baxter: I’m noticing in a lot of subscription businesses that they’re gaining new trials as people are being forced to establish new routines because they can’t do what they’ve normally done. People are forced to endure the friction of learning a new way of doing things, whether that’s buying a printer so I can print at home or having video conferences instead of the regular book club at somebody’s house. When we go back to normal, some of these new tools in our tool kit are going to stick with us. So if you’re a subscription business right now, you want to be thinking really hard about how you’re going to make this new habit a permanent habit for your new subscribers.
Anthony Napolitano: I think that’s absolutely right. You’ve seen it on both sides. Some things will make people feel they have tried this and now will continue doing it, or they have tried this and now think that the old way was so much better.
Robbie Baxter: So I want to close out with a speed round. So I just want you to answer the question with the first thing that pops into your mind. First subscription you ever had?
Anthony Napolitano: CDs.
Robbie Baxter: CD of the month club?
Anthony Napolitano: Yeah. BMG, the one I can never cancel. Yep.
Robbie Baxter: Your favorite subscription that you have today?
Anthony Napolitano: I guess I’d have to say Netflix.
Robbie Baxter: What do you think is your superpower?
Anthony Napolitano: Thinking quickly.
Robbie Baxter: What do your employees love about working with you and hate about working with you?
Anthony Napolitano: I’m open minded, is a thing they like about me. I empower them. I can be pretty direct.
Robbie Baxter: And what is the one thing that you want people to retain from this conversation?
Anthony Napolitano: I think a growth mindset. There is always an opportunity to do something better, whether you’re an entrepreneur, intrapreneur or, if you’re focused on the customer really solving, critical pain points they have. I think that is really critical for success.
