MESH/diversity Hires New VP As It Prepares To Scale Up
MONCTON – Saint John-based MESH/diversity has named Adrienne O’Pray, the former president and CEO of the New Brunswick Business Council, as its new VP of client success.
She succeeds Donna Carson, who is retiring.
The announcement came a few months after MESH/diversity, which offers services and a software platform to help companies use data to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, raised $750,000 from investors to support product development, sales and marketing and customer success initiatives.
Co-founder and CEO Mike Wright says O’Pray is a great addition to the growing company.
“We are really in a strong growth trajectory within the business and that means bringing on a lot of clients,” he said.
MESH/diversity hopes O’Pray’s leadership will help it boost its growth by maintaining the focus on customers and enhancing the processes that will increase client satisfaction. Its clients are primarily in North America.
O’Pray brings leadership experience from two decades of work in the public and private sectors. She also brings customer service experience from her time at Bell Aliant, and experience as Chief Operating Officer at Atlantic Lottery Corp.
“I always had worked in sort of customer-oriented organizations, so it’s kind of a full-circle back to the private sector, working in the client success area again,” she said.
Additionally, she brings experience championing change and promoting economic and social policy debate and development in New Brunswick. O’Pray was recognized with the Public Policy Forum’s Frank McKenna Award in 2018 for her contributions to public policy.
O’Pray, who joins the company remotely from Moncton, said she switched gears from her six-year role at the Business Council because the opportunity to join MESH/diversity was something that she couldn’t pass up. She had previously worked on projects with co-founder and CEO Mike Wright and CFO Elaine McKinnon.
“It’s too good,” she said. “It was just an opportunity that happened to come along and one that was obviously very interesting because of the importance of the work that MESH does around diversity and inclusion, which was really of interest to me.”
O’Pray also joins MESH/diversity just as the company started taking part in Venn Innovation’s pilot Set to Scale program, which is funded by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.
Through the program, MESH/diversity works with a coach who supports them by ensuring they deploy scale-up strategies properly. The program only started in December, but Wright said his team is already seeing benefits.
“It really helps companies at our stage to be able to stay focused in the right areas, to be able to build an operating system for our business, to be able to maintain and make sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction so that we stay focused and continue to grow because the juncture we’re at is very, very critical,” he said.
Covid-19 hasn’t negatively impacted MESH/diversity. Wright says they’ve had “a very strong year.” But 2020 also brought an increased emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the corporate world following the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others that have led to a global anti-racism awakening and Black Lives Matter movements.
“The world really changed when George Floyd was killed, and it took an unfortunate and tragic event to have the corporate world really wake up to the importance of this work and the impact that it can have in the organization,” Wright said.
“We had a lot of clients coming to us looking to properly embrace a [diversity and inclusion] strategy to implement systems to tackle that systemic problem. So through 2020, we did grow very, very strongly from a business perspective, and we’re seeing that trajectory continuing through 2021.”
Inda Intiar is a reporter for Huddle. Send her story suggestions: [email protected]