Meet Julie. She decided to ditch the 9 to 5 grind to pursue her dream of becoming an entrepreneur. With a little elbow grease and help from Volusion, she's now a successful online business owner. Are you ready to do the same? Sign up for a free 14-day trial and turn your passion into profits, just like Julie.
As Founder and Chairman, Sproles drives Volusion's overall strategic vision while overseeing all facets of the company's operations. Sproles originally started coding and designing websites early on in his career, and his passion quickly grew into a business. Out of the numerous clients he quickly acquired, most started to request the same need – a shopping cart. At this time, shopping cart software was in its infancy. Always up for a challenge, Sproles took the endeavor head on. With very little money and a great deal of perseverance, he started coding shopping cart software and Volusion was created in 1999.
In Volusion's early stages, Sproles worked by request to build software that fit clients' needs, often staying up all night implementing a new feature. He notes that his favorite thing to tell clients was, "Remember that feature you asked about yesterday? Here you go." This mentality remains a core value at Volusion to this day and drives its developers to continually implement new features and functionality to benefit those who know it best – their customers.
Sproles has won several business awards for his success with Volusion, including BusinessWeek's "Best 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25" and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal's "40 Under 40 Leadership Award." Despite these personal accolades, Sproles's greatest honor stems from his philanthropic work. As a believer in the adage, "great success demands great responsibility," Sproles established the Volusion Foundation. In addition to providing deserving non-profit organizations with free online stores, the Volusion Foundation also generously donates to World Vision to improve the lives of impoverished children around the world. Sproles recently made a visit to Africa for a first-hand view of how the foundation's donations were being utilized. After his return from such an inspirational journey, Sproles is more dedicated than ever to grow Volusion's reach to enhance lives, both on and offlline.
Clay Olivier, Chief Executive Officer, oversees and guides the direction of Volusion with a strategic vision and motivation for helping business owners succeed online. Olivier played an integral part in Volusion's growth of 5104% between 2005 and 2011.
With over ten years of ecommerce experience, Olivier is personally familiar with what it takes to run and manage an online business. Olivier was one of the first 100 customers to use the Volusion platform and worked closely with Volusion's Founder and Chairman, Kevin Sproles, to build his own online store. As a former customer himself, Olivier knew early on that Volusion was in business to serve other businesses. Today, Volusion continues to lead with a customer-first mindset and is one of the only ecommerce providers to offer free, unlimited 24x7 support to over 35,000 online stores for 10 years running.
In addition to growing the business and focusing on the customer experience, Olivier has helped Volusion become the leader in ecommerce innovation, charging the way with the original one-page checkout, Fraud Score™, mobile commerce and Social Store Builder™. Olivier has also led the company in garnering many awards and accolades. Some of these include "Best Ecommerce Solution", "Best Customer Service" and "Innovation of the Year". Volusion was named to Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Most Brilliant Companies List, #16 Fastest Growing Software Company, #5 Fastest Growing Software Company in the Inc 500, #87 Fastest Growing Company by Deloitte and a Top Workplace in Austin.
Before entering the ecommerce industry, Olivier helped lead the Large Opportunity group in the Small Business Division at Dell, and previously worked as a stockbroker with Charles Schwab. Olivier studied at the University of Texas and continues to support anything related to his hometown of Austin, including local businesses and being outdoors.
The most rewarding job Olivier has is husband and father to his wife and two kids.
David Mitzenmacher is Volusion's Chief Customer Officer, representing the voice of our 35,000+ customers in all aspects of Volusion's business activities from strategic planning to daily operations. He provides leadership for the Customer Experience, Customer Service and Business Excellence teams and works cross-functionally to help all Volusion employees find new ways to "wow" customers every day.
Under Mitzenmacher's guidance, Volusion's Out of this World™ Support has continued to lead the industry and win multiple awards including Customer Service Team of the Year, Top Customer Service Company, and the Customer Experience Innovation award. He was named Customer Service Executive of the Year at the prestigious National Customer Service Awards for his work with Volusion. However, the professional achievement he is most proud of is the fact that 9 out of 10 customers say they would recommend Volusion to a friend.
Prior to Volusion, Mitzenmacher held leadership positions at Rackspace and FedEx Office. He has been quoted in multiple publications as a thought-leader on customer experience topics including Net Promoter, Lean Six Sigma for Service, and the Service-Profit Chain.
Outside of work, Mitzenmacher enjoys going on adventures with his wife and daughter as they explore Austin and beyond.
Jason Wallis, Vice President of Product Development, is responsible for driving the next generation of the Volusion platform. Jason works closely with the leadership and product teams to define an architecture that efficiently meets the needs of our customers.
Wallis is a software developer at his core, owning a strong passion for crafting technology and software that drives business growth. Wallis believes that any problem can be solved by "just doing it," instead of spending unnecessary time talking about a solution. He brings almost 20 years of experience to Volusion, starting his career as a private consultant that built custom software to take small and medium businesses to the next level. After a brief period in technology consulting for the public sector, Jason spent 12 years at Dell as an architect on their industry leading ecommerce platform. He eventually moved to the role of Chief Technical Architect for all of Dell's internal software development.
Jason believes in the power of teamwork and knows that great things happen when people collaborate to solve a problem. He is an avid Agile enthusiast and embraces the power of innovative ideas and direct customer feedback. Jason believes that customers' needs should drive the direction of a technology platform.
When not immersing himself in the work of building software, Jason enjoys the live music scene in Austin and spending time at his ranch with his wife and 4 children.
Randon Kelly, Vice President of Finance, is a key member of the decision-making team, working closely with executive leadership to drive growth and efficiencies. Kelly is responsible for the financial planning, analysis and reporting activities.
Kelly's leadership experience includes three years at GE Capital, 15 years at Dell, and serving as the Finance Director of Andrew Harper. For the two years prior to joining Volusion, Kelly founded and ran his own financial management consulting company where Volusion was a client. This experience cemented his passion for helping small and medium sized businesses achieve success.
A 5th generation Texan, Kelly grew up overseas in Greece, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil but saw fit to return to his native land where he earned both a BBA and an MBA from The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business.
Jason Woosley leads the Volusion product team, with responsibility for product management, product marketing, user experience, software development and quality. In this role, Woosley directs product roadmap definition and execution against roadmap milestones.
He brings a wealth of strategic product knowledge from previous roles at HomeAway and Borland Software, where he directed a portfolio of multi-national software suites. An agile enthusiast, he adopted scrum for all Volusion software development and redefined the product management and product marketing roles for the company. He is an unabashed champion of trustworthy, predictable product deliveries.
Woosley holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business and a Master of Business Administration from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
Steffanie Halstead, Vice President of Support, brings a wealth of experience in driving customer centric scalability. She works closely with her team of 80+ to help foster and deliver Out of this World™ Support to all customers, whether it's through personalized interactions, self-help channels or just-in-time communications.
With a background in Six Sigma, she knows that every optimized process begins and ends with the customer. This knowledge has led to several innovations in how our customers receive support, all in the name of providing easily accessible information, 24 hours a day.
A finalist for Best Mentor/Coach of the Year in the 2011 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, Steffanie is a firm believer in the value of human capital, creating an environment where her team can freely share ideas to improve processes and grow within the organization. She realizes that her team has direct access to invaluable customer feedback, and turns these insights into improved customer experiences. Prior to coming to Volusion, Steffanie was the Senior Manager in Customer Experience/Business Excellence at Dell and the Customer Retention Manager at Intuit.
Tanya Avila was named General Counsel of Volusion Inc. in October 2010. Avila oversees all aspects of Volusion's legal affairs around the world as well as managing Volusion's compliance and brand enforcement efforts.
Avila began her legal career at internet giant GoDaddy.com in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her passion for technology and law provided unique insight into matters related to new product development, hosting liability, and brand protection. After moving to Austin, Texas, Avila served as General Counsel for Wincor Nixdorf USA Division. In that capacity she was responsible for the operation of the US legal department of an international leader in financial and retail technology.
Avila is a graduate of Arizona State University and Arizona State University College of Law. She is a member of Arizona and Texas bars. In her limited spare time, Avila enjoys spending time with the future boy band, 'The Avila boys', otherwise known as her sons Zander, Gabriel and Slate.
