Top Women Leaders 2019LEAVE A REPLY
Profile
A technology pioneer and digital visionary, Catherine is a seasoned entrepreneur who has founded and scaled several businesses over the last 20 years.Her entrepreneurial career kicked off while in school at Georgia State University, where she started a house sitting and dog walking business. To her surprise, Coca-Cola found her business and invited her to bid on an RFP to manage their employee discount program. She won the business, left school, built her first website and started calling on other companies. Under Catherine’s leadership, the business successfully grew to serve more than 1 million employees at 150+ companies.
Sparkfly evolved after Catherine began investigating options for tracking digital benefits against employee usage. Unable to find suitable technology to do so, she saw the gap in the market and acquired a company for the technology that would become the foundation of the current Sparkfly (spinning off the original company as Sparkfly Perks).
Catherine and her team were one of the first to develop connectivity between media and the point of sale and invented two issued patents related to tracking mobile media and store loyalty. She believes that mobile offers can be the unifying force between mobile media and the point of sale, and was named one of Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch.
Leveraging this new groundbreaking technology, Sparkfly continues to grow and develop innovative technology to solve real business problems and create real results for its clients.
Catherine also served as the chair of the marketing committee on the Woodruff Arts Center board of directors, and is currently a member of the Board of Visitors at The University of Georgia.
Champion for others before self. Champion for industry before company. Champion for clients before all. She is one of the foremost experts of in-store and commerce technology. She owns more than a dozen patents in the Point-of-Sale/offer management space (a complex and fragmented market) and she has built an incredibly successful company (in Atlanta); working with some of the largest retailers to power their digital infrastructure (Chipotle recently issued a joint press release with Sparkfly as their digital tech partner who are partially responsible for the company being able to achieve 100% digital revenue growth). Catherine consistently reiterates that Chipotle’s digital transformation success is due to the Chipotle tech, product and marketing teams; that she’s developed the middleware to enable them to innovate on top of it. She’s changing the game for retail, quick serve/fast casual brands, instead of strong-arming retailers, as tech companies tend to do. She’s a champion for women inside her industry and outside of circle. She’s an avid connector, she seeks to continually grow her team members and constantly improve the company’s technology to ensure she can help her clients future-proof their digital infrastructure and strategies. If asked, she states that she believes her contribution to her clients is to reduce their friction, increase efficiency and effectiveness of all their digital investments.