See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 19 How to Connect Frontline Workers to Strategy and Culture.
Alex: Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders. I’m delighted to introduce you to Nicole Alvino, co-founder, CEO, and now chairwoman of FirstUp. Nicole pioneered the market for digital employee experience, scaling this AI-first SaaS company to hundreds of millions in ARR, 25% EBITDA margins, and a global reach—over 20 million employees across 100 countries. Nicole, welcome to the pod!
Nicole Alvino: Alex, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Alex: You co-founded a company that helps companies connect with their people. So these stats that I brought up—did I miss anything? Are there more new stats? This is really a remarkable story, from startup to supporting some of the largest companies in the world and how they connect with their people.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, and I think that’s the main point. We sometimes joke about world domination—we’re never, ever done—but really it’s about finding an important problem, one that nobody else is solving really well. I’m super passionate about people-first leadership and companies. I often tell other CEOs: you realize nothing happens in your company without all of your people aligned, engaged, and executing the strategy. That’s something I’ve been passionate about, and it’s been pretty incredible to see some of the world’s largest companies use our technology to meaningfully connect with and engage their people.
Alex: Well, I love your journey, and I personally resonate with it a lot because of what you co-founded. FirstUp—back when I was at SuccessFactors—we were also working on engaging employees and building high-performance organizations. We found this huge gap between the strategy that the CEO and the organization had and the ability to execute that strategy. And guess what one of the biggest bottlenecks was? People just didn’t understand what the strategy was. They couldn’t break it down in a way that was meaningful to them. It wasn’t reinforced consistently enough.
We were very fortunate to build a public company and exit to SAP on that premise alone. But we didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of communications—we focused much more on alignment and more classical HR functions.
SAP is developing a tool to connect with frontline workers through mobile technology. You’re opening up a whole new area within HR software. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, so I think the big “aha” for us—and where we really found product-market fit—was focusing on the internal communications role, but really looking at the office of the Chief Communications Officer. If you go back a decade ago, we saw an opportunity to do two things.
First, to connect with frontline workers. Big tech—no offense to SAP—but especially a decade ago, no one was thinking mobile-first, and no one was really focused on that part of the workforce, which, by the way, is 80% of the world’s workforce. And those jobs—especially now with AI—healthcare, service roles—those aren’t going away.
So we said, look—
Alex: Let’s humanize this for our audience. What are some of these job descriptions? This is retail. This is retail financial services, right?
Nicole Alvino: Yes—frontline financial services, hospitality, manufacturing, healthcare. Those are our biggest industries. And the problem is most acute there because a lot of companies, before us, were literally trying to talk to their employees through layers and layers of managers and even telephone trees—which we all know how well that works. Some people are still printing pieces of paper and putting them on bulletin boards in break rooms. Again, we can see how well that works.
Alex: I see some people saving those pieces of paper as PDFs and thinking that’s somehow going to magically engage employees across a screen. That feels optimistic a lot of the time.
Nicole Alvino: Correct. And then you have people—in some parts of home healthcare—who don’t even meet anyone. They’re expected to be trained, onboarded, and engaged, but there’s really no way to do that unless you bring technology into the mix—something that can be personalized to the employee.
What we saw was, first, that this group of employees was completely disconnected and had access to almost nothing. Second, we looked at what was happening in our consumer lives. At that point, everyone had a mobile phone. We were starting to get hyper-personalized experiences.
Think about buying a pair of Nikes. You look at them, don’t transact, then you get a well-timed email about free shipping. Something pops up on your phone with another offer. Eventually, you buy the Nikes. Nike learns about you and continues to personalize the experience to build that relationship.
We said there’s nothing like that in employee experience. And if we think about how critical it is for a company’s success to connect with its people, that has to be foundational. There was a huge opportunity to bring that consumer-type experience—what marketing does on the customer side—into the employee world, while staying focused on solving the frontline worker problem.
Alex: So you’re essentially bringing marketing-level capabilities to employees—especially frontline employees who historically haven’t been reached. And “frontline” often means customer-facing. If those employees don’t know what’s going on, aren’t motivated, and aren’t aligned, then when you run your satisfaction surveys, you’re leaving a lot to chance when it comes to the quality of the customer experience.
Nicole Alvino: Absolutely. And yeah—this is a hard problem. Why solve a problem if it’s not very hard? But if you think about Hilton, Hyatt, and Rosewood—those are customers. And if you think about their client experience, the guest experience, it really comes down to the connection you have with the person checking you in, the housekeeper, or the person working in food and beverage.
For those types of brands, their revenue and growth are driven by the guest experience they can deliver, which is directly tied to the employee experience—how employees feel and how they then exude that. So that’s just one example.
And again, you go to retail—Tesco is another big customer. This is exactly how you drive repeat traffic and same-store sales. You have to be able to connect with and engage your people. Everything from giving them what they need to know from an operational standpoint—safety issues, things that need to be swapped out—to more culture-building activities that make them want to stay and perform at their best.
Alex: So if we think about modern marketing, right—let’s say outside of B2B—
Nicole Alvino: I think I lost surround sound now.
Alex: Can you hear me now?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: So, modern marketing—without the technical issues—delivers a personalized experience across channels and across different moments in the customer journey. When we think of employee experience historically, it’s more like a one-size-fits-all portal. One-size-fits-all, non-downloadable employee brochure or employee guide, and so on.
They’re typically stuck in one format, in one place, with one login. And it seems that for this to actually be effective—for the message to really get through—you need a more open-minded perspective on what that centralized experience can look like. You can still have a centralized space, but with deeply personalized journeys as well.
For internal communications, there wasn’t a platform for them. Can you tell us a little bit about what you had to do to build that out—and who were the people that got it immediately? Because you had to educate people too, right?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah.
Alex: Like, “Hey, that’s the future. That’s marketing. We can learn from that.”
Nicole Alvino: Right, right. And I think the first thing is that the good news was everyone kind of hated their current portal—if they even had one. So no one was going to argue and say, especially a decade ago when we started and I was out there selling the dream, “Oh no, I love my SharePoint intranet with a thousand links and stale content that takes eight hours to upload.”
There was no denying there was a problem. There was also no denying there was no good way for companies to reach frontline workers—whether that person was driving a truck, interacting with a patient or guest, or working on a manufacturing line. That was an acute problem.
And the beauty of it, especially for internal communications, was that there wasn’t a platform for them. There was really no technology. If you look at what Marketo unlocked for marketing, what Workday unlocked for HR, what Salesforce unlocked for sales—those functions changed completely once they had technology to manage communications and measure everything.
Internal communications was frankly the last member of the C-suite that didn’t have their own platform—one where they could prove success and say, just like marketers, “I’m running a communications campaign.”
Alex: Yes.
Nicole Alvino: Whether it’s CEO strategy, M&A, or safety, they could actually prove the results of that campaign. Take safety, for example—you can look factory by factory and see who engaged with the safety content. And then, no surprise, you can correlate that with safety incidents.
You can see who completed the training, their readership, their engagement—and you can see incidents go down or disappear. It’s about proving that campaigns work. We’ve known that campaigns work—from politics to marketing—but it’s been a different mindset to apply that thinking to employee communications.
Alex: So if we talk about the Chief Communications Officer role—some organizations tend to be more internally focused than others. We were chatting the other day about how some own PR, support investor relations, ESG communications, stakeholders, government affairs, and internal communications.
In some cases, PR is closer to marketing and measurement. Investor relations is about educating and onboarding investors. Did you find that leaders who owned both external and internal communications were earlier adopters and faster innovators? Or was it more like, “I own internal, it’s lagging, and Nicole, solve that for us”?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, that’s a good question. The people who saw the big vision first were the companies where internal or employee communications rolled up into marketing. That was a no-brainer. They just got it.
Alex: You didn’t have to convince them. They were like, “This is silly.”
Nicole Alvino: Exactly. And interestingly, those people often tried to use their customer marketing tools for internal communications—and it never works.
Alex: So they tried Marketo, and it didn’t work.
Nicole Alvino: Salesforce doesn’t work either. Marketo is hard enough for marketing—it definitely wasn’t built for this.
Alex: Fair enough. So that was the initial instinct you had to overcome. And then they realized, “Okay, now we’re ready for you.”
Nicole Alvino: But then, you know, for Chief Communications Officers, once you get to the right person, it’s almost always a no-brainer. And I think our first customers—who are still customers today—Boeing, Dow, and Hilton—it really came down to this: you have no good way to connect with the majority of your workforce.
And that’s just not okay, whether you look at it from an IT or tech equity standpoint, or from a culture standpoint. There’s also no way you can move this workforce forward without that connection.
I’ll tell you a story about Boeing. This was several CCOs ago. I sat down with Tom, and I said, “Tom, you have a massive disconnect here. How can you possibly—when you and the CEO own culture and strategy—how can this be?” And he said, “You’re right. Our frontline workers building our planes are the culture. They are this company, and they’re the most disconnected from everything we’re doing at corporate. And that’s not okay.”
Some of it was simply acknowledging that there’s a fundamental problem—a real business problem. If you can’t connect with the majority of your workforce, how are you going to activate them?
Alex: It’s called the Soviet Union. I grew up there.
Nicole Alvino: See, there we go. There we go. That’s one way. That’s one solution.
Alex: Yeah. They had a saying—which actually attracted me to employee communications later—but I was too young to fully get it at the time. Someone told me there was this motto: if you didn’t steal anything, you didn’t work hard enough. Can you imagine that level of disconnect?
That’s a very top-down system—no alignment and very little trust. And I think large bureaucracies sometimes have smaller versions of that. At a certain scale, you inevitably run into organizational communication challenges.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, it’s inevitable. Especially now with Gen Z. Gen Z is going to make up 30% of the workforce by 2030. They’ve grown up in a completely different way. They’re digital-first. They’re not reading emails or long-form anything.
They also expect a much more collaborative, bottom-up experience. They want to be connected and part of something. There are a lot of macro forces at play that make the old top-down, Soviet-style approach work less and less.
It’s also just harder to get people’s attention—to get them to do what the company needs—while also making them feel good about what they’re contributing and helping them find meaning and purpose in their work.
Alex: You brought up Gen Z, so let’s double-click on that. I think it’s fascinating that in employee benefits, engagement, and communications, one of the core themes everyone recognizes is that you have many generations in the workforce at the same time.
You need to roll out similar messages, but people will want to engage with them differently. You can’t just rip and replace everything for the 50-plus generation. Many of them are senior leaders, and you want to help them make a meaningful transition.
At the same time, there’s risk in communications and HR if leadership isn’t on board. And then you have Gen Z—and even within the same person, whether Gen Z or a 50-plus executive, engagement can vary. If they really care about something, they may want to go deep in a more traditional way.
There are also individual learning styles layered on top of generational differences. Some people are visual, some auditory, some collaborative, some linear—boom, boom, boom.
I find this a fascinating problem. You can’t just throw everything out and start from scratch for Gen Z, because most companies aren’t startups serving other startups. So what have you learned about supporting different generations and different learning styles?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, this has always been a core tenet of what we do. You need to meet people where they are—physically, digitally, in their language, their context, their career stage, and their life stage.
That leads to the idea that we must provide a personalized—really, a hyper-personalized—experience. Benefits are a great example. Many companies have three generations of workers, and they need very different things just from a benefits standpoint.
Instead of saying, “Here’s our 100-page benefits guide—good luck,” and then spamming people with emails to sign up, there’s an opportunity to segment communications and deliver different experiences and reminders for different benefits.
You probably know this better than anyone, but sometimes up to 80% of benefits go unused simply because people don’t know they exist.
Alex: Yes.
Nicole Alvino: That’s not a benefits problem—it’s a communications problem. It’s about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Being able to push information to people in ways that match how and where they prefer to engage is critical.
That’s part of the AI layer we’ve built—to understand people’s preferences so we can reach and engage them more effectively. Then it becomes about what to give them in that moment—whether it’s maternity or paternity leave, bereavement support, or mental health benefits.
Awareness matters, but in the moment when someone actually needs something, you have to be able to deliver that information clearly and immediately.
Alex: Yeah, I think it’s really beautiful. As we were discussing earlier, you almost have two fundamental roles. One is delivering precise, personalized, relevant information. And then, once you land that, there’s also the question of whether it’s told as a story—whether it’s framed in a way people can actually connect with.
That’s what we focused on and related to. I think we need more people who can say, “Let me deliver this story to you,” within a framework that fits into the broader ecosystem people already know how to use. Then, further down the line, you can drive behavioral change.
Someone gets the information, it becomes relevant, they dig into it, understand it, learn something new, and change a behavior. I think that combination is really powerful to bring into the world.
I love what you’re doing, and I’m a huge fan of the platform you’ve built. What were the challenges in building this? We’ve talked a bit about early adopters. You’re working with very large organizations, which sounds impressive—but anyone who’s tried it knows it’s not trivial.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, no—look, I was just chuckling because one of the books I read and reread is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It’s all about the crazy things you can’t imagine that actually do happen, and you just power through them.
We knew early on that we wanted to sell to large customers, which is obviously a big decision for a SaaS company. The other side of that, though, is—
Alex: Because you don’t have a Chief Communications Officer in a 200-person company, right? Usually it’s 500-plus.
Nicole Alvino: Exactly. It’s not an acute problem at 200 people. You can get by with Slack and a few other tools. It’s just a different scale of problem.
Once you hit a workforce of 4,000 people—spread across the world, in very different roles—you suddenly need vastly different types of communication and experiences. That’s really where the problem starts.
The more heterogeneous your employee base is, and the more geographically diverse it is, the more obvious the challenge becomes. When you’re looking at companies with 15,000, 20,000, 50,000, or even 300,000 employees, and you think about all the messages—strategy, updates, team changes—it quickly becomes overwhelming.
If you don’t figure out how to drive signal through noise using personalization and relevance, you’re just overwhelming people.
Alex: Especially since we’re already overwhelmed by our phones.
Nicole Alvino: Correct.
Alex: And at least that’s easier to digest.
Nicole Alvino: Right. And with big companies, when this becomes the way CEO messages, CEO videos, and organizational updates are delivered, there’s no room for error. Failure isn’t an option.
In the early days, I’d get texts from customers—
Alex: And these were global customers, like the UK—Tesco, for example.
Nicole Alvino: Exactly. So I was always on. From a personal standpoint, especially in the early years while we were building the company and maturing our functions, I’ve always believed in having strong personal relationships with customers.
I love hearing the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course, you aim to have no problems, but no software is ever completely bug-free. Those challenges become learning and growth opportunities.
Alex: What was it like selling to communications leaders, but also to HR? This is clearly an HR-centric use case. I’ve sold to HR before, and it can be challenging—there are lots of tools, and teams aren’t always as practiced at buying technology. We had to learn how to enable internal champions.
So what was your experience with multiple stakeholders—not just the Chief Communications Officer?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, that’s a great point. About 40% of internal communications teams roll up to the CHRO. So for us, it often involved the CHRO, the CCO, and increasingly the CIO.
Ultimately, there’s usually CFO and CEO approval as well. In some cases, this was a very personal CEO initiative. Take Tesco, for example. Their CEO, Ken Murphy, wanted a direct way to connect with colleagues. He said, “We’ve never had a meaningful two-way interaction, and I know how important it is to empower people to drive business results.”
He became part of the buying committee and ultimately decided who he wanted to partner with. I always say this should be a CEO platform—it’s a CEO problem, 100%. And COVID showed that better than anything.
To your point, there’s now so much noise around people, performance, efficiency, and productivity. So the challenge becomes finding the right champion in communications or HR—someone who truly understands the value.
We do a lot of enablement: helping build business cases, creating ROI models that CFOs can understand, and giving champions the tools they need to bring in IT and other stakeholders effectively.
Nicole Alvino: A huge stakeholder often—sometimes they’ve taken over the process—so you’re basically delivering—
Alex: An intranet. And you’re a leader in Gartner’s latest intranet—
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: —quadrant.
Nicole Alvino: And the phrase everyone loves: the intranet is dead. Long live the intranet.
Alex: Yeah, long live the intranet. But historically, the intranet has very much been the IT domain.
Nicole Alvino: And it’s interesting today—what I’ve seen, especially in large companies, is two things. First, the CIO has more and more power around consolidating technology and making things more efficient. There’s a cost-cutting reality—companies overspent on SaaS during COVID.
So now it’s about: how do I make everything more efficient? Then you layer in AI and the need to allocate investment there.
What I’ve seen with forward-looking CEOs who work closely with their CIOs—especially around employees—is a focus on delivering a phenomenal employee experience from pre-hire to retire. One that guides people, helps them have a great experience, stay longer, and ultimately deliver top- and bottom-line results.
Some CIOs at large companies say, “Okay, I want to build part of this. I have a roadmap. Some of it will be in-house, and then I’ll select best-in-class SaaS solutions to plug in.” That’s one approach.
Because of that, we’ve had to be open, API-first, and very nimble. We have great examples of working closely with CIOs—Tesco is one, Swissport is another—where it’s a true partnership and we’re helping accelerate their roadmaps.
Then there are others who still say, “I want my portal. I own the portal. I own the tech.” Whether they’re a Microsoft shop or standardized on ServiceNow, it becomes about how we not only complement but really amplify what those productivity platforms are doing.
No one else has consumer-grade, marketing-automation-style functionality that’s needed to meaningfully engage all employees and drive the outcomes companies want.
Alex: This connection to the CEO is really relevant for you. You’re a CEO of a company that builds tools—for CEOs.
Nicole Alvino: Former. Former.
Alex: Former—right. But as a founder, you had to live what you were building. I sometimes find it daunting to think through my own communications, especially since our company supports communications. I like to improvise sometimes, and that adds another layer of challenge.
What have you found exciting—and challenging—in your personal journey building FirstUp?
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, and you touched on something important—the idea of “drinking our own champagne.” The hardest and most rewarding part of building a company is the people. Connecting with them and bringing them along.
I’ve always said that I want people who work at FirstUp to look back and say this was a highlight of their career—regardless of whether they stayed for two weeks or a decade. The question is: how do we connect with people in a meaningful way?
We have a purpose-built culture that people are inspired by. Our mission is to make work better for every worker, and people really connect with that. When you have mission and purpose at the core and help people perform at their best—whether that’s moving up, becoming people leaders, becoming principal individual contributors, or moving across roles—that’s incredibly rewarding.
We’ve had people move from customer success to product, and even former customers come in to lead customer success. For me, helping people become the best versions of themselves—or even better than they imagined—has always been the most fulfilling part.
That really sits at the core of what we’re doing with communication: helping people through connection.
Of course, there are challenges. Different people are right for different stages of a company. At some point, someone may no longer be the right fit.
Alex: Because the company and the mission have to take precedence over any one individual.
Nicole Alvino: Exactly. Some people realize they loved a smaller, scrappier company and that as we’ve grown, it’s no longer the right fit for them—and that’s completely valid.
My goal has always been to help guide people through that experience. It’s going to end for everyone at different points in time, but making that journey as positive and rewarding as possible really matters to me.
Alex: To build on that—we met back at Stanford, where the business school’s mission is to change lives, change organizations, and change the world.
You started your career, according to LinkedIn, at Enron. I’m curious how that early experience shaped your passion. I can see how you’ve carried lessons from that into building FirstUp. What else have you taken from your experiences before becoming CEO?
And maybe a provocative question to end on: you really did start your career at Enron.
Nicole Alvino: Right.
Alex: And so that is probably an example where things didn’t go quite as right as one had hoped. So I’d like to understand to what degree that earlier experience—before business school and during business school—shaped your passion and vision for building FirstUp.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah. Yeah, no—look, so I did start my career at Enron. I did structured finance. My bosses went to jail, which is crazy, actually. I don’t know if you know this, Alex, but two of the people who wrote my letters of recommendation for Stanford ended up going to jail. So I was terrified.
I obviously didn’t know at the time, but it was really hard for me, and I went through a period of questioning whether I even wanted to stay in business. I love business because I want to change lives, organizations, and the world. That’s always been a passion of mine—innovating, creating impact, and making things better.
This experience caused me to question that a bit. So I had my own personal walkabout for a few months with a backpack—Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia—before going back to business school. And at that moment I said, you know what? I do love building businesses.
I’d be on a surf trip and writing up a little business plan about how they could better package and price their surf packages. You couldn’t turn it off—I couldn’t help myself.
Alex: Just like you’re saying meditation, and I’m like, “Hey, we could really turn that into a business.”
Nicole Alvino: Correct. So when I realized that this is what I’m really passionate about doing, I said I’m not going to work in corporate America again. I’m only going to start companies where I can control the culture and the ethics—so an Enron situation won’t happen again.
That’s a very personal experience and something I’ve remained focused on.
Fast forward to post-Stanford: the first company I started wasn’t related at all—it was a spa company. And that’s what really taught me the importance of the frontline worker.
Everyone we hired—estheticians, nurses—everything they did mattered. Our business relied entirely on how our employees were relating to our customers. And that made me think, oh my goodness, there has to be something here between technology, scale, and culture.
How do you scale what I was creating culture-wise in these derma lounges? And then you realize there’s a much bigger problem. That experience really opened my eyes to frontline workers, who make up the vast majority of employees at most companies.
So then it became: there needs to be some kind of tech platform. That’s when we found product–market fit with FirstUp—talking about mobile-first and bringing consumer principles to employees.
I realized that what I saw in my small mom-and-pop business in the Bay Area was actually a huge problem faced by the biggest companies in the world. And big tech wasn’t solving it. So—why not us?
Alex: Well, it’s a great connection point. You’ve got a lot on your plate building this mega-successful company.
And since you brought up the spa chapter of your life, I recall the last time we caught up. I had this observation—there’s this energy that’s just oozing out of you.
For those watching on YouTube, check it out—Nicole is smiling, and there’s this aura, for lack of a better word, that transmits positive energy. It’s just a joy to chat with you now and whenever we connect.
So I wonder—what’s your secret to that? Besides maybe things you learned during your spa years. I have a feeling this is internal as much as external. That energy feels like an internal sparkle.
Sometimes I can get very much into “let’s get things done” mode and lose that. That’s definitely not an energy my kids love at home.
As a CEO, you’ve got family obligations and a lot on your plate, yet you seem to do this with grace. What’s the secret behind it?
Nicole Alvino: I think—look—I’ve said this a lot: there’s no such thing as balance. There’s no work-life balance. I’m a big “and” person. There is peace. There are moments of peace.
Whether it’s being fully present with my kids or making certain trade-offs—like I said early on, I will never travel on one of my boys’ birthdays. I have three boys. Somehow, with all my crazy travel, I’ve always made that a non-negotiable.
Yes, I’ve missed conferences. Yes, I’ve dialed in remotely. But it’s about understanding what’s important to you and what your non-negotiables are.
You’re not going to be a ten at everything—certainly not every day. Accepting that matters. And I will say, I do meditate every morning.
Alex: Tell us more, tell us more.
Nicole Alvino: I actually studied Japanese in college and did my study abroad in Tokyo. I studied the Japanese tea ceremony, which is based on Zen Buddhism. That’s what really got me interested in Eastern philosophy.
There’s this concept called ichigo ichie, which means “one moment, one encounter.” This moment—this conversation—we’ve had many before, but it will never happen again in the same way. Even if everything looks the same, it will still be different.
The idea is to be present and appreciate the moment. That really stuck with me, and I try to carry it through—no matter how crazy or chaotic things are—finding and appreciating moments of peace.
Alex: So I was expecting that, on top of all that, you were going to say you do a rich Japanese tea ritual every morning right after.
Nicole Alvino: No, I do not. I do not. I do not.
Alex: And how have you found that you’re able to share that journey and those practices with your colleagues? Because they’re maybe not the norm in a rah-rah world of enterprise sales.
Inevitably, I do find that when you go a little deeper, high performers have found a way to balance things and have some sort of meditative practice or equivalent. So how have you found that you translate that to your colleagues?
Do you talk about this in internal company settings? Do you talk about it with customers? Because many of them are trying to create a work environment where people are present.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, and I think you said the most important thing—it’s about talking about it and normalizing it. That’s part of leadership now. We have to be authentic, and we have to be transparent.
Especially when we start talking about Gen Z and Gen Alpha—they need that, and people can tell when it’s not authentic. So it’s always a balance, but I try to be open and honest with people about challenges and things in my personal life.
I also like to bring in humor and fun. One of the things I do when hosting customers—
Alex: I’m happy to steal jokes. I’m happy to steal.
Nicole Alvino: This isn’t a joke, but it’s a fun thing once you start doing it. My favorite thing to do with a group of customers or partners is have a one-table conversation where everyone goes around and shares one fun fact. You can define your fun fact however you want.
It’s unbelievable what people share—things you would have never known or guessed about them. You automatically get to a deeper connection. Sometimes it’s random, sometimes hilarious, sometimes very inspirational. But it creates a deeper level of connection right off the bat, and everyone ends up having a lot of fun because some people get very wacky.
Alex: So it’s both authentic and removes a sense of transactionality that sometimes exists in our culture.
Well, Nicole, this has been lovely for me. One of my goals is to learn how to build a great company and have a smile like yours. To wrap up, if you had to give advice to Nicole starting FirstUp, what would be one or two pieces of advice you’d give yourself?
Nicole Alvino: I would say always trust my instinct—trust my gut. I can look back at times when I didn’t and made decisions that went against what I knew, and invariably they didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
No matter the other influences, that’s important. And one of my favorite mentor friends once told me: don’t sweat the small stuff—and by the way, it’s all small stuff.
Whatever you’re facing, even if it feels like the biggest problem ever, with a little perspective, it’s actually not. In moments of very high highs and very low lows, perspective really matters.
Alex: Perspective and equanimity are always helpful. It sounds like the Buddhism and the rituals are working well.
Nicole, where can people find your wisdom—and that of FirstUp—if they’re corporate communications leaders?
Nicole Alvino: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find FirstUp at firstup.io, on LinkedIn, and across all channels. You can reach me at [email protected].
I’m always happy to have conversations. I’m very passionate about this topic and about solving problems for heads of communications, HR, and ultimately CEOs.
Alex: Well, it’s been a joy to connect with you. I hope our audience—many of whom, like us at RELAYTO, are passionate about these topics—will explore what FirstUp is doing.
We’re excited to be supporting the same ecosystem and thinking about similar issues. Please reach out to the FirstUp team and to Nicole if you see opportunities to collaborate. Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole Alvino: Thank you, Alex.