Get to Know OCTANe’s CEO, Bill Carpou

Bill Carpou, OCTANe CEO, discusses more of his background and how he ended up at OCTANe.  With a background in sales and private equity, Bill has now been at OCTANe over 4 years.  See the entire OCTANe team here and hear more about Bill below!

Transcription:

Ben Bobo: How did you go from the progression of where you started to the CEO of a nonprofit: OCTANe.

Bill Carpou: Yeah so, I think like anything, it becomes a bit of a journey. So I graduated, I won’t give you the exact date so I’ll give my age away, but in the late seventies from college and uh, I was fortunate enough to join Xerox and, so I was, I was a copier salesman initially and, it’s been 13 years there, but probably not a better organization to have started your career with if you wanted a career professional sales, uh, you know a lot of process, a lot of discipline, um, setting ambitious goals, you know, and, things of that nature. So yeah, I think coming out of college, that was a great, uh, that was a great first step. And as I said, it lasted for 13 years.

Then the next step in that was really to move to Icon Office Solutions, which was somewhat of the same industry. Uh, and I spent 18 years there. And you know, that that progressed from really just sales and sales management and general sales management, which I had had at Xerox to, um, you know, a more, a, more global approach on things. And, uh, yeah, I’ll look it up. The company that, that, that was global, but more importantly, a variety of different positions inside of it. So touched operations, general management, uh, ended with doing M&A, which is what we sold actually with the company to Rico. And I moved on from that stand point.