Introducing Julie Currie, a distinguished leader with more than 20 years of experience in driving business growth through transformative initiatives across companies of all sizes and industries.
Currie has held pivotal leadership positions in product strategy, consulting, sales, operations, and technology for the consumer-packaged goods and market measurement sectors. Her extensive experiences equip her with unparalleled insights into cultivating high-performing organizations. Currently, as Chief Revenue Officer at Quad, Currie leverages her deep expertise in organizational change, data, and analytics to deliver exceptional value to the company and its clients.
Empowering Businesses through Innovative Marketing Solutions
Quad isn’t just a marketing services firm—it’s a dedicated team of professionals focused on delivering the highest quality, data-driven, integrated marketing platform to the client. Known for its unmatched scale and expertise, Quad offers comprehensive services in marketing strategy, creative solutions, media deployment in online and offline channels, and marketing management services.
Quad takes a client-centric approach and excels in various sectors, including financial/insurance, consumer packaged goods, and publishing. With a strategic focus in the Americas, the company has successfully established itself as a global leader with strategic partnerships in Asia and beyond.
Early Career Ventures: Moving Ahead
Currie holds an MBA from Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Michigan State University. This strong academic foundation has equipped her to successfully navigate complex industry challenges and drive impactful results throughout her career.
Julie’s journey began with influential roles that set the stage for her future leadership success. She joined Nielsen in 2001 and relaunched the retail product portfolio into a data-as-a-service (DaaS) model that achieved over 30% revenue in its first year. Her success at Nielsen showcased her ability in client service and cross-functional management, culminating in her role as Senior Vice President of Global Retail Product Leadership in 2016. Subsequently, she served as an Executive Consultant at FCM, LLC, assisting private equity portfolio firms with employee engagement during transformations. Currie worked there for two years before joining Quad as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).
Transitioning to Quad: A New Chapter Begins
Currie’s journey took an exciting turn when she joined Quad as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. In this role, she is responsible for driving the company’s business growth by expanding beyond traditional print services to offer clients a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions.
Talking about her key inspirations, Currie explains, “I’ve learned from two kinds of mentors. The first focused on execution and the tools needed to get things done. They may not have the best leadership style, but they instilled in me the importance of achieving results. The second kind of mentor taught me what it truly means to lead—to set a vision and empower the team. It’s okay to be tough on performance, but gentle with people.”
For Currie, setting a vision means painting a picture of Quad’s future. Building on the company’s legacy she envisions a path that transforms Quad from its origins as a Midwestern print manufacturer into a comprehensive marketing experience company. With more than five decades in print, Quad now helps brands establish direct consumer connections in the household in-store and online at scale. Today, the company focuses on utilizing its strengths in optimization, disruption, and resilience from its print roots to tackle the biggest challenges faced by its primary clients—marketers and marketing decision-makers. This evolution is crucial across the company, particularly within the sales team that drives revenue growth.
For Currie, this means fostering sales leaders who think beyond themselves and create a team mentality.
“My a–ha moment in my career, which is a core aspect of my leadership style, is that we need team-based selling,” she states. “It’s challenging as a single contributor to know both the breadth of capabilities that we have at Quad and what is needed by the audience you’re talking to, at least in our business.”
Currie believes that real revenue potential is unleashed when sales representatives work as a team to extend their thinking beyond familiar products and adopt a more global mind–set that understands and solves a client’s biggest problems today and anticipates where the next pain point is coming tomorrow.
“For me, the challenge is finding ways to get teams to collaborate effectively, finishing each other’s sentences, and really showing up in a room where it’s so obvious that they’re a cohesive team rather than a group of individuals,” she explains.
While this approach may seem counterintuitive in sales, where competition and personal achievement have traditionally defined success, Currie sees this as an opportunity for leadership.
“We want salespeople to have strong egos because their confidence contributes to success, and that’s perfectly fine,” she says. “I’m not trying to tamp down people’s egos, but I do want them to check their egos at the door. When they walk into the room with the client or into the sales area, it is crucial that their ego does not overshadow what Quad has to offer the client.”
“We see a multiplier effect, the flywheel when we engage with clients to sell solutions to the problems they may not even realize what they have,” she explains. “This involves introducing Quad and the various ways we can serve them, which means no longer just a solitary product, like direct mail. It also means being open to all the clients’ needs and collaborating as a team within Quad to deliver the right mix of solutions.” Leadership can see when this approach comes together.
“We’ve found success with people who can navigate that sales conversation and get to a place where they see the biggest opportunity,” Currie says. “It’s not always a straightforward process; it requires tenacity and a level of fortitude to nurture those relationships and to open those doors that are hard to open.
Currie’s influence as Chief Revenue Officer is profound, yet her leadership reaches beyond revenue generation. As the head of Quad’s business resource group for women, she envisions more than a traditional networking platform she is establishing a community where women can support each other throughout their careers to impact Quad’s business as an influential community of leaders
Word of Advice for the Aspiring Leaders
Currie offers valuable insights on thriving and leading effectively in today’s business world. “First and foremost, be curious and be bold. Throughout your career, you may encounter moments of complacency, and you’re going to feel like you have it all figured out. But you haven’t. Being curious and bold will not only benefit you as a young professional but most importantly, it will give you the skillset that you can then apply throughout your career. When everything changes all around you, you’ll have adapted to it because you’ve been curious about what’s coming next—whether at your company or in your industry—and you’ve stayed relevant and stayed ahead. That’s how you become the best at what you do.”