Today, we’re excited to honor our chief technology officer, Nancy Spear. After spending 40 years at Multipub, she will be retiring at the end of this month. We interviewed Nancy, our Founder Gay Manning and President Lorna Fenimore to share about their experience working with one another.

“Nancy and I have worked together for over 30 years. Her great sense of humor adds levity to our office and brightens each person’s day. She cares deeply about our company and clients and has remained focused on making their lives easier,” said Lorna.

Nancy began working at Multipub in 1981. We asked Gay about why she hired her, and she responded, “I founded the company in 1978, and it was slowly growing. At the time, I played duplicate bridge with Nancy’s dad. Her employer was going to transfer her to a different state, so he asked me if I needed any programmers. I said I did, and this marked the beginning of what would become a very long friendship and working relationship.”

Nancy played an important role in developing the first Multipub system. At the time, we had a single publication software. One of our clients was quickly adding more titles, and they were looking for a platform that would allow them to sample people every three months. Before building it, Nancy famously said, “How hard can that be?” Four decades later, we are still modifying and adding new technology to our subscription management system.

Over the course of her career, Nancy has been integral to the evolution of Multipub. She developed our ecommerce system, which connected our platform to our clients’ websites. This allowed publishers to seamlessly take orders online and transfer the data to our system.

“There’s no problem too big or too hard for her to solve. Nancy is brilliant. I’ve always felt that if Nancy’s working on it, it’s not insurmountable,” said Lorna.

Looking back at her career, Nancy says she values her clients and co-workers most. Collaborative in nature, she has enjoyed creating collectively with our talented development team. Her takeaway from her time at Multipub is that working with others always leads to the best ideas.

We asked her frequent collaborator, Gay, to share what she will miss most about working with Nancy. Gay said, “We’ve had such a wonderful relationship, solving problems together. We would call each other and run ideas by one another. That partnership is something I really value.”

As she closes out her last few weeks at Multipub, we asked Nancy what advice she’d give to someone just beginning their career. She said, “I’d tell them to find something they’d like doing 8 hours a day and then, to work hard at it.”