Nakul Kadaba's career seamlessly integrates data analysis, customer success, and project management. With nearly seven years at HubSpot, where he honed his skills in customer success and professional services, Nakul now leads the consulting department at Mole Street. He focuses on building robust Customer Success and Project Management functions, driving client engagement, and delivering exceptional service offerings.
In this interview, Nakul shares insights on his current projects, the types of clients he supports, his superpower in data analysis, and the Mole Street value that resonates most with him.
1. How would you sum up your expertise?
I would sum up my expertise as a career of two halves. More on the first half below.
For the second half of my career, I fell into the HubSpot ecosystem, but by accident. A friend who happened to work at HubSpot referred me – a data analyst by trade – to their Customer Success team. Thankfully I got the position, and stayed at HubSpot for nearly seven years – working with clients on the Customer Success and Professional Services teams. I also managed both sets of teams before accepting the position at Mole Street.
2. What type of work do you lead at Mole Street?
As part of the Executive team, I am head of our consulting department at Mole Street. In addition to that, I also am building our Customer Success as well as our Project Management functions for all of our client engagements and service offerings.
3. What types of clients do you support the most?
We are interested in clients who want to map their business processes and tools through the technologies we support in our services. To that end, we are interested in people who embody a mindset of continuous improvement, partnership, and long-lasting impact.
Clients coming to us with big problems – systems architecture, go-to-market strategy, and operations – and an open mind tend to result in great partnerships with us here at Mole Street.
4. What is a current project you’re working on?
There are quite a few! What comes to mind includes supporting our sales & marketing efforts, strengthening our Customer Success rhythm to provide consistently excellent delivery, and further aligning our Consulting and Tech departments to allow for superior consultative value for our clients.
5. What do you enjoy most about your work?
Understanding our clients as people, and realizing their business goals and metrics through our services. Mole Street has considerable knowledge, and that shows through our services and aptitude with all of our technologies.
However, the more important value-add is the work we do to understand our client’s business models, how we use technology to translate their processes and operations, and make their lives easier.
6. What is your superpower?
Data analysis and visualization. My previous life was as a data analyst – taking disparate amounts of data, identifying trends, and subsequently using that to provide recommendations for clients to increase their operational effectiveness.
I was lucky enough to write some blog posts, HubSpot community posts, and even appear with others like George B. Thomas to talk about reporting and related subjects. Check them out, and I hope they are helpful to you.
7. What’s one Mole Street value that has special meaning to you? Why
Curiosity – I think this has served me well throughout my career.
I want to understand greater purposes behind a business and the people working there. Beyond a business goal and metrics, I want to understand the psychographic attributes of businesses – interests, challenges, successes, failures, and others. This helps me really understand people I am working with, and shows through my actions of wanting to make any consulting partnership the most impactful to others.
8. What’s inspiring you now?
I recently started re-reading Ikigai, which is a Japanese concept of how you should build your life to be fulfilled and content. Ikigai translates to “a reason to live” and helps one categorize your interests, necessities, and hopes into a meaningful and intentional life.
9. What is one fun fact about you?
I am a huge proponent of the financial independence movement. It helped me in the early stages of my career understand how to manage and have a good relationship with money.
10. Where can we catch more of your expertise?
Please reach out to me on LinkedIn to get in touch! I tend to do guest blog posts from time to time on a variety of topics I am passionate about.
Regardless, I am always excited to meet people and learn more about them, and their interest. Here’s my meetings link! Let’s chat.