Navigating Work Life Balance with Nina Kentsis of UBS Bank

Bill Gullan:

Greetings, one and all. Thank you for joining us on Champions of Purposeful Change. I’m Bill Gullan, president of Finch Brands. We are grateful and excited today to bring you an interview with Nina Kentsis. Nina is multi-talented, and the bulk of our conversation is about her role and what has led up to it as Director of Client and Market Insights at UBS Bank US. She’ll take us through her journey along the way on the supplier side and the client world as well across categories and areas of focus. She’ll also take us through… Hobby undersells it. She’s an accomplished and very interesting screenwriter, and we’ll talk about how to balance professional passions and personal passions and sort of what has propelled her forward. So thank you to Nina, and enjoy.

We are so excited to have Nina Kentsis join us today. Nina is the Director of Client and Market Insights at UBS Bank USA, thank you for being with us.

Nina Kentsis:

Thank you for having me.

Bill Gullan:

It is our pleasure and it. You have a fascinating career and other interests that we want to hear about too that have been noticed and rewarded for your talent, a renaissance woman. Take us through, if you wouldn’t mind. I promise I won’t make fun of the Duke basketball team, but take us through your journey from at what point along the line this insights became of interest and just kind of take us through. It’s been a great ride.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah. Sure. So I’m not sure if you have my resume or LinkedIn, but there are probably some jobs that are not on there because they are so long ago. But my very first job after Duke was at a company called Ask Jeeves.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, I remember.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah, which is still around, I believe, in some way, shape, or form. But the idea was that they were going to help you search the Internet. And my job there was on their corporate side of things where I had clients. And some of those clients were financial services, which is interesting since that’s where I ended up now. But my job was to work with those clients and look at how people were using their website and figure out what people were searching for, and what people were searching for that they couldn’t find, and make recommendations to the client like, “Oh, people are looking for this content on your website and you don’t have it. Maybe you should add that so that we can map people from their query to that content.”

And then it was the dot-com bust in San Francisco, and I worked briefly for this very small chamber orchestra of all things, because I thought that I wanted to go into, not-for-profit arts management. And working for a small chamber orchestra made me realize that I did not want to go into not-for-profit arts management. And then I moved back to New York and went to business school at Columbia Business School. And after business school, I thought I wanted to stay in New York City and also work in media. And there were not so many media companies that are in New York City versus let’s say Los Angeles. And I started working for this publishing company. They’re called Prime Media.

The history of my resume is all these companies that no longer exist. So Ask Jeeves doesn’t really exist. Prime Media doesn’t really exist, but some of their magazines do like their bigger titles such as Motor Trend, and Automobile, and Soap Opera Digest, which I think still exists. And they also had a lot of very small niche publications.

So I did marketing for them, which meant driving people to the site, getting them to subscribe or renew, and a lot of that was making it easier for people to subscribe or renew or take the action that we wanted them to take, which was in some ways kind of similar to what I’d been doing at Ask Jeeves, making the website easier for people to use. And then I did something similar at Time, Inc., for People Magazine, another company that doesn’t exist anymore. And then I moved to Boston after getting married, and my husband was doing some medical training in Boston, so I didn’t think I would stay in publishing, but I ended up getting a job at the New England Journal of Medicine, which is probably never going to go out of business, and did some very similar work there in terms of driving people to the site, getting them to subscribe to the journal that I worked for. And my transition from that kind of work into market research came really at that point. I got a call from a company that was then called Communispace, which is now called C Space.

Bill Gullan:

C Space, sure.

Nina Kentsis:

They had found my resume on Monster.com and they called me in for a job interview for a job that was not quite the right fit, but we just kept talking. And I was like, “Tell me a little bit more about this market research stuff and what you guys are doing,” and they hired me into this job as what was called a community manager, but was really a market researcher. And I really learned the world of online communities and online market research in that job. I would say some of the more usability user experience type work I had kind of been doing on the online marketing side of things.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

But writing surveys, writing discussion guides for these online bulletin board discussions that we did all the time. I probably had four clients at a time at C Space, and each client had two to three what we called activities each week in their communities. And my clients, some of them were financial services, some were retail, they ran the gamut. And that was a real sink or swim kind of thing for market research, writing eight surveys a week, let’s say, which is crazy.

Bill Gullan:

That’s a lot.

Nina Kentsis:

But that’s what we did. And then analyzing the results of those surveys, and discussion guides, and online chats, and whatnot. And I was at C Space for about four years, something like that.

And then I did some consulting work in market research consulting for C Space, consulting on the research side for the New England Journal of Medicine. And then when we were moving back to New York after my husband finally finished all the work in Boston, I emailed all of C Space’s competitors in New York City. And that’s how I ended up at this company called Vision Critical, which is now called Alida. And we always thought of them at C Space as a competitor to ours.

And then coming to work for Vision Critical, I no longer really thought of them in that way. The C Space communities tend to be very cozy, I guess is a way you could describe them if you can describe an online community as cozy. They’re very small. The people who are in them often develop real world IRL relationships with people. They work really well for communities that maybe have a sensitive topic or for people who are very excited about a particular topic. And the vision critical communities tended to be much larger. The software was so much more robust than what C Space, which meant that you could do a lot more with a survey, but it also meant that you couldn’t really field four surveys a week into one community because it took so much longer to write them, and to program them, and so on.

So my clients there, some again, were financial services, I worked with Yahoo as a client, Gucci was a really interesting client.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

And then Vision Critical decided that they really wanted to be thought of as a Software as a Service company, and so the market research side of things got spun off, they divested themselves of the North American market research side of things. And that became a company called Maru.

We actually could never decide if it was Maru or Maru.

Nina Kentsis:

And then it was Matchbox. So Maru was kind of the holding company, and Matchbox was the company that I worked for. And so between Vision Critical and Matchbox, that was maybe another five, six years of working again in this client side, community/panel space. And I did some interesting projects for them.

As I said, Gucci was a really interesting client because that world of high-end retail doesn’t usually do this kind of market research. But they were launching a cosmetics line and they wanted to do research on that. They wanted to understand why they felt certain clients were no longer as engaged with the brand like they were not spending as much money. And so they had some interesting projects.

And then when I transitioned over to the Matchbox side of things, I was on their financial services and healthcare teams. So my clients were all financial services clients. And while I was there, I really started looking in earnest for jobs on the client side in research. And I interviewed with many companies. And I’m probably still five years later, six years later, still waiting to hear back from some of them.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Your Monster listing is [inaudible 00:11:21], yes.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah. Craigslist, whatever. And I got in touch with someone that had been my client when I was at C Space. And my client was Citibank. And I got in touch with her, and through her, kind of triangulated through the HR world at Citibank and had one or two interviews. And then finally had an interview for a job that was a research job, but more on the usability type side, which I had, again, a little bit of experience with, but not a lot of experience. And so I didn’t get that job. But here is the weird thing.

During my interview, I learned that the woman that I was speaking with… So as I said, we moved to Boston for my husband’s medical training. We moved back to New York because he got a job as a physician scientist here in New York City. And we were living in housing for people who worked at the hospital where he worked and some other medical organizations in New York City.

And the woman I’m talking with is like, “Oh, where do you live?”

I say, “This is where I live.”

She says, “Oh, this is where I live.”

And it turns out that her husband worked for one of the other medical organizations that had this housing. So we lived in the same building in [inaudible 00:13:00].

And so I didn’t get the job. And then I ran into her in the laundry room of our building.

Bill Gullan:

“I hope I didn’t get [inaudible 00:13:11].”

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah. She’s like, “You know what? You really weren’t the right fit for this job, but I know that there’s going to be this other job on this other research team that I do think you would be a really great fit for. Can I send your resume over to the hiring manager?”

And I said, “Sure, that would be great.”

And so she did. And that was the job that I ended up getting on the client side at Citibank. That was my first move over to the client side. So you never know. You really never know who you’re going to run into in the laundry room of your building.

Bill Gullan:

Yes. You got to be at your best in the laundromat.

Nina Kentsis:

Exactly.

So Citibank, at the time, when I first started, had a couple of different research teams that ultimately got consolidated. And since I left almost two years ago, I know that there’ve been some other changes at Citibank. But while I was there, I worked on projects initially, a lot of projects around improvements to the mobile app and the Citibank website, and then moved on. And then after a small reorg there, those projects went to a different team, and then my projects were really around our high net worth clients, ultra-high net worth clients, emerging affluent, and then I did a number of projects for the fraud prevention team.

And again, as my first client side job, I think it was a great transition because Citibank, at the time, had a very big budget for research. And I don’t know exactly what it was, but maybe it was like a million dollars. That’s a pretty big client side research budget, I think. And we did so many projects, and a lot of it was with external vendors.

So again, like I mentioned, C Space was one of our vendors. We had a number of other market research vendors for qualitative work, for quantitative work. And so some of what I was doing was managing those vendors. Some of it was managing the research itself and stitching together the stories from different pieces of research and then figuring out how to describe research to people who weren’t very familiar with it. And I think I got a little bit lucky at Citi because people were, in fact, pretty savvy when it came to research. It was very ingrained in the product teams to do research before releasing something to the public. They almost thought of it as a controls effort. How can we release something live if we haven’t tested it?

And so part of the reason for leaving Citi was that I wanted to be promoted and I was not for various reasons. And in an odd twist of fate, the woman who had been my manager who hired me into the job, she left. I applied for her role. I didn’t get it. I ended up leaving to go to UBS, which is where I am now. And someone who had been my client when I worked at Vision Critical, who’d been my Yahoo client, got in touch with me, and I referred him for the job at Citibank, who you know him, David.

Bill Gullan:

Mm-hmm, yeah. David, yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah, and then he ended up getting hired in for the job at Citi. So again, if people are listening to this and wondering, “How do I get a new job,” tell everybody you know that you’re for a job, and you may have people in your network who will help you find one.

The UBS job I actually found, I didn’t find. Someone found me for it, a recruiter who had been in touch with me on and off for a couple of years, and he put me in touch with the recruitment team at UBS. It was a very easy recruitment process there. I didn’t have to go through 47 rounds, neither did I have to do that at Citibank. But I think the fact that I had the experience on the agency side, specifically in managing online panels and communities was very appealing because what we’ve been doing now is building those in-house at UBS. So I work on the bank side at UBS. Not investment bank, but more like consumer banking, which is something that we’re building out like products and services that we’re building out.

And I do work very closely with my research counterparts in wealth management and in our, man, I can’t remember the name of their team, it changed, but basically the usability and user experience side of things. And my team is my manager and me and two others, and we’re in our client experience team on the banking side.

Bill Gullan:

Yep.

Nina Kentsis:

And as I said, it was great at Citi that everybody was really passionate about research. I don’t think that’s quite… We’re not quite there yet at UBS. There are people who are very passionate about it, who are not on the research team, and then there are people who still need a little more education in terms of what research can do for them.

And so some of my job there and my teammates job are around meeting with people, talking about the research that we have done in the past, maybe sending them some competitive research or secondary research that we’ve sourced, giving them an idea of, “Oh, what is research? How can it help you?”

As I said, we’ve built out some panels within UBS. One is for our advisors, one is for what we call our team associates. So they’re like the support team for the advisors. And we use those all the time across three different research teams. We don’t, as of yet, have a way to talk directly to our clients. That’s something that we’re working on as well. So yeah, so that’s where it comes from.

Bill Gullan:

That’s a great tour.

Nina Kentsis:

That took like 20 minutes.

Bill Gullan:

We got laundromat, we got all sorts of stuff. So you’re a French and literature, if LinkedIn is to be believed-

Nina Kentsis:

Yes.

Bill Gullan:

… in undergrad. At what point did the sort of passion for insights get into your soul?

Nina Kentsis:

I did this summer internship when I was at Duke, and it was the summer before my senior year. There was this institute, I guess you’d call it, at Duke, called the Center for Documentary Studies. And I spent an awful lot of time there. I took documentary photography classes there. They had a documentary film festival. They had a magazine that one of my friends worked at. And so the summer before my senior year, I did this project where I, along with other college students from mostly around the south, actually, we taught middle school and high school students in how to go out into their communities and conduct oral histories and bring those back so that we could then assemble them into a book for the people of their community.

So I worked on a project that we called Faith Stories, and it was like the kids, some of them were Jewish, some of them were Muslim, some of them were Christian, and we went out into those different religious communities in Durham and did interviews with people. And that was like the first kind of anthropological, cultural anthropology kind of thing that I’d done. And even the job at Ask Jeeves was, in some way, about understanding why people were doing what they were doing on the website. The problem was that we couldn’t ask them that because it was not a two-way interaction.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

So what became really interesting about the research side, when I got that call from someone at C Space was answering that question, “Why are people doing the things that they’re doing?”

And I think some of that goes to, you kind of alluded to this, but what I do outside of work when I find the time is write screenplays and write stories, and those are often also about trying to figure out why people do the things that they do, even if they’re not real people. Oftentimes, at least for me, I think people read books, and they go to movies, and they watch television shows about fake people as a way to help them understand their own lives. And so that’s what I find interesting about market research.

Bill Gullan:

Right, absolutely. A couple other questions just from the journey, you told us about the pivot into the client side world. And while at UBS, maybe as opposed to Citi client side work, does sound like it has… Since it’s a lot of DIY, it might be more of a-

Nina Kentsis:

It is very DIY, yes.

Bill Gullan:

… more of an agency-ish kind of thing. But what are some differences that you observed? You mentioned writing eight surveys a week, and then… What’s the difference for good or for ill between life in the supplier world and life on the client side?

Nina Kentsis:

When I was on the agency supplier side, I had multiple different clients. And I think as a way to get into research, you can’t really beat it because if you’re lucky, you learn so much about so many different clients, and how their companies work, and how their businesses are run. And if they use research well, then you can really have an impact on their business. And I think… I don’t know what C Space is like now. I would say that that was a very special time to be at C Space because it was still very relatively small. The woman who was the CEO at the time was amazing, and I feel really lucky to have had that experience as my first market research job or any job, really. What was not great about the agency side, and again, I don’t know if this is true at every agency, hopefully not yours, but sometimes there’s this manufactured sense of urgency. Like the client needs this and we have to drop everything immediately.

One of my current coworkers had come from… She’s only two years out of college, maybe three years out of college now. She had spent a year and a half or so at an agency before coming to UBS, and she was saying that she would get these emails and phone calls from clients at 11:00 at night. And they would expect her to do whatever it was that they needed doing.

Some of that, I think, is that some of the management of that should really come from the higher up on the agency side. You have to manage your clients.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

How is someone who’s 21 years old, 22 years old, going to say no to the client? That’s not what they’re really going to do.

So yeah, so I think you have to be a little lucky in where you end up if you’re on the agency side.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

And then on the client side… Sorry, what was the question?

Bill Gullan:

Just the differences you noticed.

Nina Kentsis:

The differences? Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, now you’re attached, you obviously, as you said, have a multiplicity of projects and audiences, but you’re focused on UBS all day every day and-

Nina Kentsis:

Right. So the reason that I wanted to move to the client side was that one of the drawbacks of being on the agency side is that you will often do the research and you hand it off to the client. And if you’re lucky, if your client is good, and you have a really good relationship, they will tell you what happens next.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

But you don’t always know what happens next. And that, for some people, they’re like, “Okay,” like Ariana Grande, “Thank you, next. Let’s move on.”

But for me, I was like, “Well, I want to know what happens next.” I want to be more involved. And so that’s why I wanted to move to the client side. And I would say that at Citi, I got a little bit of that. I got a little bit of that, but not as much as I feel I have at UBS. I think at UBS, we’re much more of a consultative partner to our internal stakeholders.

Bill Gullan:

Right. You mentioned also in your UBS role you are helping to stand up a, maybe not a new offering, but there’s a lot of newness around the part of the bank in which you’re working, and that probably creates a connection to outcomes that may not naturally exist, but sounds really thrilling.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah, that’s part of why I wanted to take this job was this opportunity to help build something new.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, help build something new, right. You talk about your early career experiences in the Internet age, and I had some as well, and the world was changing, and the bubble was inflating and bursting and inflating again.

When we look at today, and you and I both having had different stops along the way, but having been pretty well ensconced in the research world for a bit of time now, what are you seeing out there, whether it is… Everyone’s talking about AI or there’s other things. What are you seeing out there that’s exciting to you that may be innovative or maybe it’s reinforcing basics that have always been there in a new way, but what are some things from being a student of this industry that have caught your eye recently?

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah, we did talk a little bit about AI. I wish that it was something that we were adopting more speedily, I guess, in the research world, at UBS. And I think it will happen eventually. I think it would be really helpful for analyzing the videos of one-on-one interviews, multiple videos so that you can synthesize something a little faster. I don’t think it’s going to replace what we do because… Maybe it will, but hopefully not. We know the business and the people and the players in a way that I don’t know that the AI would quite that easily.

So other tools that we’ve been excited about are some… This is probably not very exciting to most people, but we don’t have a very big budget at UBS for research so one of the tools that we have used a couple of times is it’s an online platform for basically online focus groups, but you can put media in there for people to react to. And it’s not anything like… We kind of had stuff like that. Even at C Space, it wasn’t maybe so robust, but it’s something new. It’s a way to run a whole bunch of qual-quant type studies together with 30 people at one time. So that’s been interesting.

I don’t really know that there’s anything that I’ve seen that’s so new and different just because I have been in the industry for a while, and I’ve been especially on the Software as a Service side of things I had been for a while. And I think a lot of the offerings are very similar to one another. It’s just a matter of which bells and whistles you need that this particular vendor supplier has. Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Right. Are there any challenges out there in the research world that are sort of begging for a better solution?

Nina Kentsis:

I think as someone who is sometimes on the other end of research, I don’t know. Something that I’ve… You want research that’s like maybe in the moment without being creepy.

Bill Gullan:

Yes. Right.

Nina Kentsis:

So there was some talk a while back like the idea of geo-targeting and whatnot. Oh, this would’ve been a little more relevant for Citibank because they have physical banks.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

So you go into Citibank and we know you are there because you’ve turned this function on on your phone, and then you walk out of the bank and we send you a text message that says, “Hey, you just visited a Citibank branch. Tell us about ABC.”

Some people might be like, “Yes, that’s amazing. I do want to tell you about ABC,” and some people will be like, “That’s super creepy. Why do you know that,” because they’ve forgotten that they’ve opted into this thing.

Bill Gullan:

Right. Sure.

Nina Kentsis:

So yeah, and then it’s not quite market research, but with the election happening in a very short period of time, and you read all these polls, and you don’t know what to believe about the polls, and then you realize who are they polling? They’re polling people who are going to pick up a telephone call from someone that they don’t know. It’s an unknown number. I don’t pick up phone calls from unknown numbers, right?

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

And I’m sure you, on the supplier side of things have this concern about who are these people, really?

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

Who is answering the call? And are they representative?

So for us at UBS, when we have thought about sourcing clients in the wild, so to speak, it would be very expensive to do so. But then we’d also have to verify them as a UBS client. So those are some things that we think about.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

Like how to talk to the right people at the right time, and how to make sure that they are actually who they say they are.

Bill Gullan:

Right, certainly.

Before we let you get back to your day, tell me about your writing, your novels, your screenwriting, both because it’s fascinating. So two questions, I guess. One, how it lights you up and unlocks another facet of who Nina is. And then two, how do you knit that into a fully formed life with professional and personal obligations to keep at it to the degree that you have, because it’s impressive. So love to hear a little bit about your chronology there, even though it may not be research-related.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah. So I took short story writing classes, I did a summer program in high school and took some writing classes there. And then in college, I took two short story writing classes. And then when I was in San Francisco after I lost my job with Ask Jeeves, I did these random things. I bartended, all sorts of random stuff. And I decided I was going to take a screenwriting class. One of my good friends from college who I’d met because we were in this a writing class together had taken some screenwriting classes at Duke, and I was like, “I want to do that too,” and I took, I don’t know, was it like an adjunct class or whatever at City College of San Francisco? It was like $33, $11 per credit. It was so cheap.

Bill Gullan:

Nice.

Nina Kentsis:

And it was really just so that I could get an idea of what is the structure? How do you write screenplay? And now you probably wouldn’t even need that class because you could just go online and find out almost all the same information. But it was really helpful because it forced me to do the thing. And I took one of my short stories that I’d written junior or senior year of college and turned it into a screenplay. So that was the first screenplay I wrote. So that was a very long time ago.

And I would say that that screenplay is still not quite done. I still feel like I can go back to it and improve it. And so I was writing on and off again, mostly screenplays for a number of years, and joined a screenwriting group that met maybe every other week in New York City after I graduated from business school and wrote a couple of other things. And then my son was born, he is now almost 15-and-a-half. So when he was born, I really just could not concentrate on the writing. And I really put it aside for maybe almost five years until my daughter was a year-and-a-half, and she’s almost 12 now.

And then I picked up the story that I’d started as my very first screenplay, and then I wrote something with my sister, and I adapted someone else’s novel into a screenplay, I started entering some competitions, I wrote another screenplay with my sister while I was waiting for her to get it together to work on it with me, I wrote another screenplay that got into a screenwriting lab five years ago through this organization called The Athena. It’s called Athena Center at Barnard College, and I found out about that because they put an ad in the Columbia Alumni magazine. And since I’ve gone to business school at Columbia, I saw that ad or that email and I applied for their lab. And that was five years ago in LA. And then I kept in touch with the women that I met there and just kept on writing.

And in fact, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, my sister and I were in a screenwriting lab for the screenplay that we’d written. It’s very loosely based on a sporting activity that took place at our high school. And so we got some feedback on the screenplay, and I think we have a much more clear picture in our head of how we’re going to move forward with the main character and change the story a little bit.

And then maybe two years ago, a friend of mine from the screenwriting lab that I went to five years ago told me about this thing called National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo. I’m sure you have not heard of it, but-

Bill Gullan:

I do not. Yeah.

Nina Kentsis:

So apparently every November is National Novel Writing Month with NaNoWriMo, and you can sign into their website, and it’s like an accountability group, kind of. Like, “Oh, how many words did you write today,” because the goal is 50,000 words at the end of the month. So I started a novel, and that was almost two years ago. And now I’m polishing it up and I feel really confident about it, and I just hope that somebody else feels confident about it, because I need a literary agent to take it to publishers and so on. It’s a young adult, new adult kind of novel, so yeah.

Bill Gullan:

So what is all this to you? Is it a hobby? Is it cathartic? Is it therapeutic? Is it a second job? Is it-

Nina Kentsis:

It’s not a second job.

Bill Gullan:

… a way to be alive?

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Another way to be alive? How does it fit?

Nina Kentsis:

I don’t make any money off of it.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, right. But you’re obviously passionate-

Nina Kentsis:

[inaudible 00:41:40] good job.

Bill Gullan:

You put a lot of yourself into it, though. You’re obviously very passionate about it.

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah, I maybe will sound like a crazy person, but I have stories in my head and they need to come out. So the way that they can come out is writing them down. And a screenplay is not meant to be read like a novel. It’s meant to be read. So you write the screenplay and you hope that somebody will produce it. But the only thing that I can control is actually writing it.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

So I just have to make it as good as I can so that hopefully there’ll be a producer who wants to produce it. And the only thing that I can control about the novel is, well, how good is it? And that… So, yeah. But I don’t think I would ever quit my day job unless someone could guarantee me a five-picture deal.

Bill Gullan:

Right.

Nina Kentsis:

A really big advance on a novel, and you’ll see the next four novels that I write.

Bill Gullan:

That would be perfect. Maybe you’re building up to that.

Nina Kentsis:

Maybe.

Bill Gullan:

Well, last question. You’ve been so generous with your time and your story as well, Nina. Podcast metrics are sort of hard, but we suspect that there is a portion of our audience who are either starting out or starting over in their career, and there’s something about insights and about brand that is intriguing to them, and hopefully we and our guests are adding some value to how they think about their own journeys.

So as you reflect back from French and literature as an undergrad, dot-com experiences, supplier side, client side insights, as well as this incredible, I don’t know whether we call it a hobby, or whatever we call it that you’re doing with screenwriting, are there any words of wisdom that are sort of a thread for your career path or what you might share with somebody who’s sort of in that position who may be inspired by your story?

Nina Kentsis:

I would say maybe to be open to new opportunities. I didn’t know that I wanted to work in insights until someone called me and told me what it was.

Bill Gullan:

Interestingly, it seems like nobody was dreaming of a career in insights.

Nina Kentsis:

I don’t think that’s true. I think some people are-

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, I’m sure there is some, but most people that we ask-

Nina Kentsis:

I think some people… Yeah.

And when we moved to Boston, I didn’t know… I didn’t really want to move to Boston. No offense to Boston. But I was very happy in New York and all my family lives here. But I would say something that I do regret while I was living there is feeling in some way like I was transient. Like I’m not really going to be here, even though I was there for seven years. And so I would say carpe diem, like today is the day. You will probably have tomorrow. We can’t guarantee it, but probably you’ll have tomorrow, but also you have today, so you shouldn’t be halfway out the door. You should be like… And I don’t mean in a Sheryl Sandberg like a lean in kind of way. Just take advantage of what is around you and don’t think constantly of the next thing.

Like my daughter who I mentioned is 11, she’s almost 12. And she’s like, “Well, I’m practically 12.”

And I’m like, “Enjoy being 11.”

Bill Gullan:

Yeah, don’t wish it away.

Nina Kentsis:

You could be 12 soon enough. Enjoy being 11.

Bill Gullan:

Yeah. Mine are 11 and 14, so similar…

Nina Kentsis:

Yeah.

Bill Gullan:

Almost 12, and as they say, it goes, “The days are long, the years are fast.”

Nina Kentsis:

Yes.

Bill Gullan:

But anyway, seizing the day and making the best use of today is a great place to leave this, but thank you so much for your generosity, both in terms of time, and insight, and also the inspiration of this. It was a real pleasure to have you.

Nina Kentsis:

Thank you and have a great rest of your week.

Bill Gullan:

Thank you as well.

Three ways as always to support us. Thank you, Nina, for your time, your insight. Your passion shines through.

You could support us at Champions of Purposeful change in a couple of different ways. One is to click subscribe in the podcast app, I guess, of your choice to make sure you don’t miss an episode. We’re going monthly at this point. We’ve stuck with it. Our plan is to continue. Of course, it’s nobody’s full-time job, but we’re doing the best we can and it’s been so much fun to bring stories to the marketplace about what we feel, again, is a very impactful, yet perhaps not as visible role, which is typically an insights leadership within client organizations, transitional businesses, transitional categories. And we’ve really been pleased so far. We’d love if you subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a one.

And we’d also love your feedback. So if you rate and review our podcast within that app of choice, that’ll make sure that we can, A, receive, I guess, your comments and how we can make this ever more valuable. And B, it’ll also help, I think, elevate our profile for those who will find this valuable.

And then lastly, send us a comment either via email, be going at FinchBrands.com, or perhaps the easiest way is via Twitter or X, @BillGullan, @FinchBrands, ideas for future guests, future topics, feedbacks on what we’re doing well or not as well, we’re very interested in both. So thank you for your time today and we’ll sign off from the Cradle of Liberty.