Risk management is a series of processes whose objectives are to identify, address, and eliminate software risk items to an operation. Today, we are happy to highlight Joe Marshall, our Risk Manager, whose goal is to add value to our service by mitigating fraudulent activity, reducing the number of chargebacks, and developing other safeguard policies for ShowClix and our partners.
Joe graduated in 2002 from West Virginia University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics. After college, he worked at Enterprise for 3 years after spending some time in the insurance industry. One of Joe’s proudest achievements was obtaining a Master’s in Business Administration from Robert Morris University in one year while working full-time, raising a toddler, and remodeling a home he purchased with his wife that year.
Joe’s long time friend from West Virginia and current employee, Aaron Crothers, explained to Joe how much he loved working at ShowClix and told him to apply. In 2010, Joe joined our team as a Risk Manager and still today he has been working hard to monitor activity in our system to ensure happiness for our partners and their ticket buyers.
As a Risk Manager, you proactively protect our partners by streamlining the admissions strategy, mitigating fraudulent activity, and participating in attendee verification. Walk us through a typical day at the office.
It’s definitely a team effort. Phil Spina, a member of our Finance Team, helps me with a lot of the day-to-day operations. First and foremost, we want to check our proprietary risk management software system for any orders that we’ve set parameters to identify as “suspicious.” After taking a close look at all of these, we then move forward with contacting ticket buyers whose orders need to be verified. This protects ShowClix and our partners from the financial risks associated with fraudulent orders. At that point, I start taking a look at any events that have been added to our system over the previous day. We want to make sure that our partners succeed. In order to do that, we review all event listings that our partners chose to create themselves and make sure nothing out of the ordinary is going on. Next, I begin to take a look at the previous day’s financial reports, since we can get a lot of useful data out of those (hint: it’s a lot of spreadsheets). From there, I move onto one of my most important job functions – issuing payments to our partners for their ticket revenue. The remainder of my day involves meeting with my team to discuss chargebacks, refunds, etc. and with other departments to formulate strategies to help our partners succeed.
You’ve been with the company for a little over 6 years, what inspired you to work at an event technology company like ShowClix? Â Â
I was just so excited to join a startup company in Pittsburgh with a motivated team. I had worked for a large company for a few years and everything was just so robotic. ShowClix afforded me the opportunity to work with great people and to be really involved in a lot of areas of the business, which keeps things from getting boring or stale.
What advice would you give someone looking to get into your career?
You should really learn how to use Excel, and never ever overestimate how good you are at using it. Also, keep your mind open to new ideas and products. You’re never going to be able to do it all yourself, so just keep a team mentality and don’t be afraid to utilize software or other products that make your process more efficient.
You collaborate with many different departments to make sure that the chargeback process, refunds, and paying our partners for their events all go smoothly. What’s the secret to keeping all of this in order?
If I tell you it’s not a secret any more, right? The answer might be coffee or listening to music while I work to maintain focus. The real answer here is teamwork, which feels like such a cheap response, but it’s 100% the truth. I work with really talented and passionate people in each department. All of the processes you mentioned have so many moving pieces, and without the input and help from other departments I’d be in big trouble.
We know that you are an outstanding cook, what is one of your favorite dishes to make?
This is really hard to pick. I guess I’d have to say linguine with white clam sauce. I think it’s a dish that a lot of people don’t know they’re really going to like, so it’s always fun to watch them take that first bite and be pleasantly surprised. It’s also really versatile. You can stick to the basic recipe or you can get fancy and add some nice seared scallops and asparagus on top; just about any seafood is a nice addition really. And I got the recipe from our CEO, Tom Costa, so there’s a nice little ShowClix connection to it as well.