Interview With Lally Rementilla, VP Finance and Administration, Nulogy Corporation

Interviewee Name: Lally Rementilla, VP Finance and Administration

Company Name: Nulogy Corporation

Website: http://www.nulogy.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Lally Rementilla: I’m a senior finance professional who has had a longstanding career in the technology and media industries. By day, and most recently, I’m about all things tech and digital, and by night I’m a mother with two young kids who is trying to have lots of fun with her kids along the way.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Lally Rementilla: Most lately, a typical day for me starts off with making sure that I address the needs of my daughters, they are young and I make sure that they are ready in the morning. I walk them to school and then I start my day job. I do a lot of researching and opportunity identification in the technology and media sectors, including ecommerce, digital media, and the start-up world. I’ve been advising a lot of companies in the space and I have a particular interest in female entrepreneurs helping them identify ways to grow their company or start one up. So that includes I’m helping them with business plans, on strategizing, raising capital, or possible mergers and acquisitions outside of new ventures. I also facilitate introductions to other people in the industry that they may be able to benefit from.

All that being said, I keep abreast of all things digital and in the evenings when the kids come home then it’s a matter of keeping them entertained, keeping them learning and trying to have fun with them before they go off to sleep.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Lally Rementilla:  My motivation comes from two things. One, I constantly push myself into situations that are stretch in nature therefore the challenge of having to overcome an obstacle is actually motivating for me. I’m one of those people who are very self-motivated in that way. From an external perspective I tend to read a lot of business biographies and I follow a lot of role models especially successful women in all fields, and the successes that I have had motivates me to keep at it and do the best that I can do, and whatever it is that I put my head into.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Lally Rementilla:  In my career, and especially most recently, because I’m essentially a free agent, I’ve seen the value of establishing a diverse and strong network of contacts. So if I had to start over from scratch, I would have networked more, especially with men earlier in my career and networked with a more diverse group of individuals from a lot of industries, both junior and senior in stature.

The other thing that I realized lately is that to be competitive and successful as a company nowadays you have to go global or have a global mindset, and if I had to start over from scratch I would have tried to gain some international experience early in my career.

Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?

Lally Rementilla: The past year has been very life changing for me. It’s been beset with great accomplishments and also big changes in my life. We sold the company that I was working with for almost eight years and that was a big change. Throughout that process there was a lot of effort that we had to put in order to keep the company and its culture and the employees motivated and then there was the change from going 150 percent to zero and again for someone like me who has worked all her life for the last 20 years it’s been different.

So what I’ve really discovered about myself is I’m actually very driven, I’m one that’s always looking to be productive and making a contribution. I couldn’t stay still and my husband had been saying, “You know, take months off and travel, and forget about work and forget about the industry,” and I just couldn’t do that. I think it’s now part of my DNA in whatever way that I’m working whether I’m a free agent or working for a company it’s in me to be the most productive person that I could be.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Lally Rementilla:

1. For the most part, the biggest threat in my current free agent status, is it puts me out of the game, or the rat race and I have to put in a lot more time, effort and energy to stay current and network and not being tempted to take a break from it all.
2. The other thing is, and I’m seeing it very much so doing a lot of work within the technology, and more in the innovation industry and early stage companies is that there are so much talent and potential in Canada but limited opportunities. We still need a lot of funding, and we still need a lot of people to focus on innovation, we still need a lot of people to take risks in our companies and risks in the people and the talent that we have and that’s something we really have to address. My involvement with the industry now, more so than when I was working full time in the industry, is one way of handling it.
3. The third threat is discouragement. I’m sort of new to this mode, and I’m still in an adjustment and transition period and I can go from one day being very great and positive about the future and what it holds for me and to go to another day feeling rejected and very discouraged by what’s happening not just to me but in the industry and it’s a constant day-to day struggle to keep at it, to feel optimistic and positive about things.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Lally Rementilla: I’m going to talk about the consulting that I do. As I mentioned earlier, I do a lot of consulting and advisory services to female entrepreneurs. I think focusing on the female market is unique in and of itself, not to say no one else is doing it, but there are only a few people doing it. Coming from someone who is female, who understands what it is to be female, especially in the technology sector, and there has always been a lot of talk about helping women succeed in the industry and this is my stand to actually doing something about it. And for the most part, it is with great sacrifice because there is a lot of work that I do in this regard, especially for some start-up female entrepreneur that’s voluntary and pro bono in nature.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Lally Rementilla: The major challenge that I have had in life, especially in my career here in Canada is that I didn’t grow up in Canada. I have immigrant beginnings. I came to Canada in 1991. It was a recession year and I had almost no potential, no contacts, no working experience, the traditional things that a new immigrant face when they come to a new country looking for great career opportunities.

How I resolved it? I go back to what I said earlier that I always put myself into a position of challenge and that has pretty much been the source of motivation for me, and therefore the motivation that I have and the drive that I have reflects its way into the passion and energy commitment and loyalties I tend to have for the job and the opportunity to come my way. What’s also worked very well for me is the fact that I’m a learner, and being a learner I tend to have a more open way of looking at opportunities that allows me to grab them and take risks at them because I’m not worried about a lot of things such as status and material rewards. And I believe that a lot of this experience that I have gained, which has built my career and have helped me overcome the challenges in being an immigrant, these are things I owe to the fact that I’ve got the natural curiosity to things that helps me to adapt to situations because I’m open to a lot of things.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Lally Rementilla: From a career perspective the biggest break I’ve had and I would say it’s tied to other big breaks, but I think this sorts of puts it slightly on the edge of the move that I made to Lavalife from Lucent Technologies. I had a twelve-year career at one company and I was in a manufacturing/engineering oriented environment and I saw this great opportunity at Lavalife to do something business-to-consumer to work in a creative environment and to work in mergers and acquisitions without actually having the credentials for it.

I met with the CFO, Ron Duke, who put great trust in my capabilities and gave me my break that allowed me to make that transition from telecommunications to digital media without having the insecurities that come my way as far as making a change in my career. And even after he hired me, Ron had always given me a lot of opportunities to grow. He never said no to a lot of the proposals I made to find more innovative ways of making contributions to the company. He helped me to identify the things that I was strong at and gave me opportunities to apply myself.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Lally Rementilla:  In 2007, I was given the opportunity to help launch and lead the project relating to launching City Guides for Lavalife. It’s something that took off and I really pride myself in having worked with a great team to launch it, and I think everyone did a really great job of giving it their all, but at the end of the day, the plan wasn’t going to work in the first place because I had actually not done my due diligence when I accepted the challenge. I didn’t realize that there was no business plan to speak of when we were working on that and I was essentially launching something that wasn’t really well thought out in the first place.

That’s a big lesson that I learned that if I put my name, energy and focus into a venture then it has to be something that’s well thought out, has enough resources that sets it up for success going forward.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Lally Rementilla:  From a personal perspective, having children was a tough decision. It wasn’t a hard decision, but it was tough. And it was mainly because I had my kids at the time wherein it during an active part of my career. We were going through major changes in our company, and we were embarking on re-strategizing and identifying opportunities for growth. It was a very busy time but I knew that there was never going to be a perfect time and so I went at it. It was something that impacted my life, but I think what made it very easy was the fact that my husband was one of the most supportive man to women that I know. He made it easy for me to ease into motherhood and parenthood for all of us.

Lately Sheryl Sandberg talks about having your man or your husband be an equal partner. In my particular case I think I’m blessed with that situation and I owe a lot of my career to the support that I receive from my husband. I remember there was this one day where I got the validation that I had made the right decision to have children when amidst a very busy day my daughter sat me down, and she was probably around four years old at this time, and told me squarely in the eye, “Mommy, I want to be exactly like you when I grow up.”

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Lally Rementilla:

1. The first one is moving to Canada. I was born and raised in the Philippines and my family made a decision to move to Canada in 1990. I was very hesitant of the change at irst, but in retrospect I think it was a really good move because it helped to shape my view of the world, whereas before it was all about living in Manila and being successful in the small pond that it is. Moving to Canada, and the diversity especially in Toronto, and the access to great people, great companies, opportunities to go global has given me a worldview of things which have expanded my horizons, whether it be from a career perspective, social perspective, intellectually, my love of the arts has increased, it just gave me a lot of opportunities to grow.
2. The second one is meeting and marrying my husband. This really helped to shape my life. He has been a big supporter of the things that I want to achieve, whether it be career in nature, or the way I perceive and envision myself as a mother, and also the lifestyle that I want to live.
3. The third thing is still shaping my life is learning to practice yoga. When I first started practicing yoga it was because a friend of mine wanted to have someone come with her to yoga classes because she had recently read that yoga was good for pregnant women. I wasn’t pregnant then and I told her I would go with her and I really liked it. I saw myself valuing and getting something great out of it. This was back in 1997 or 1996, so it’s been quite a while and I found that since I started practicing yoga it’s just given me an outlet to balance my hectic life. It’s helped to give me perspective on things. It’s helped me to be more fearless and risky in certain ways. Funnily enough it has helped to improve my golf swing for some reason. I didn’t know that a natural benefit of practicing yoga was getting better in golf.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Lally Rementilla:  I have to say from a business perspective the one thing that I’m really proud of was being able to help to sell Lavalife. We sold it twice, once in 2004 for $152 million, and we sold it again November 2010.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Lally Rementilla:  Do you have a day for this Avil, because I can tell you that mentorship is something that has had quite an impact for me. I started the mentoring relationships almost halfway through my career and I have gained so much from them. If I can boil down the lessons learned – I’ve been part of both formal and informal mentorship programs and I realize gains in both – I’ll give you two big messages. One, there are the female mentors – female mentors are there to inspire me and give me great confidence in the fact that there are things in life that you can achieve and that women have a natural sense of leadership and can be in positions of influence and power. They also told me, which will also segue way into the second point, that I need to have male mentors. And if I look at the benefits that I’ve reaped from mentoring relationships with men I find that male mentors tend to give me a chance and help me to identify opportunities for me to put myself in positions where I’m learning and where I could be successful.

Male mentors, and to an extent female mentors as well, never told me that I couldn’t do anything. They’ve always opened door and let me know, and identify opportunities where I can do and accomplish and be successful at something.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Lally Rementilla: The core message is to identify and play to your strengths in whatever you do and it doesn’t have to be in business. It could also be in your personal and social life. It’s really important to have a good understanding of what you are strong at, and to use that to your advantage. Don’t worry so much about what you’re not good at because you’ll achieve more by spending time and effort in marketing what you are good at and applying those strengths in your day-to-day job.

I go back to one of my early mentors and this is in a formal mentoring program and this was when I was starting to get ahead in my financial career, and he said that “Make what you do the revenue generator in whatever company or organization that you’re in because that will put you in a position where you will be successful, and you will get a lot of support and you will have a lot of influence.” So being in finance, I always strive from a financial perspective to work on the opportunities that will utilize my strengths in finance to make money for the company or even better, help to identify revenue opportunities and execute on them as opposed to working in a purely supportive back office capacity or role.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Lally Rementilla:  It’s a recycled advice which is play to your strengths. Spend as much time as you can identifying your strengths. When you start off your career, the first 10 to 15 years, is a great time to do a lot of dabbling to find that strength and I think that’s the time in your career when you need to take a lot of risks and experiment with different ways and avenues by which your career could grow and the direction it could take, and from there I believe you will learn more about yourself and your strengths and then take the next decade or so of your career to have more of an understanding of what that strength is and market it, build your brand from it,  and apply it to make a significant contribution to the organization or company that you are working for.

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