Kathy O'Toole has a clone. Obviously, it is the only way she could have accomplished such a rich, hard-worked life, which led her to being the Managing Director of National Boston, a successful technological interactive design company.
Surrounded by daily stress, O’Toole’s energy is calm, quiet. As one of her NB coworkers, Stephen Baldwin, Colorist, states, “She has a very can do attitude. She makes you feel like things are going to happen.”
O’Toole’s confidence and “quiet” has been hard-learned and every dime she has, she earned, but nothing came easy to this lanky, Irish Catholic.
In our interview I found her unassuming and funny-- a great combination. I asked her about her childhood and quickly understood where she got her drive and sense of humor. "Growing up I was always building something. As the youngest of five, when I wasn't being dressed up like a doll by the girls, I was being tied up and thrown in a closet by the boys. I think it gave me a good balance of femininity and the ability to fight dirty.”
Her parent's attitude was shaped by the depression, “To this day, I scrape price tags off of anything that enters my mother's home fearing she will have a heart attack seeing real prices.” And her schooling began when,” My mother told me I was accepted for early entrance into kindergarten because I had exceptional skills in special relations. My father told me my mother wanted me out of the house so she could rent my room.”
Although she is a woman of a few words she found other ways to express herself. In high school, she wanted to be a musician and composer like her brothers and eventually play in the Boston Symphony. “I played trumpet in the band, French horn in the orchestra and percussion in the swing and marching bands. I also played guitar and was involved in sports so was considered not as geeky as the standard band members.”
After high school, Kathy worked as a Pharmacy Assistant, then landed a nighttime receptionist job at WCVB, TV 5 where her father worked as a security guard. O’Toole offers, “This sparked an interest in TV while removing me from easy access to prescription drugs.”
O’Toole enrolled in Framingham State (FS), Media Communications, and freelanced at WCVB. She worked on commercials; wrote/produced documentaries assisted technically on video shoots and ran camera. She was the first to arrive on the set and the last to leave. Through FS, she got a job as a videotape editor cutting educational shows on disasters for a big insurance company. Kathy admits, “Didn't like sitting in the dark all day so I continued doing freelance production work...” Later she was offered a Line Producer’s job working with Boston's top advertising agencies.
Later, in Boston, as head of production for Century Three Teleproductions with a staff of 130, she oversaw television programming and commercial production. This company was purchased by a Fortune 100 company, which also owned the top Post Production Houses in NY, Chicago, LA and SF. All of these became known as Editel. As Exec Producer, she managed non-broadcast sales and worked as production liaison with the other Editel companies, then mostly post houses.
O’Toole became liaison for the Wisconsin based parent company and formulated a Boston multimedia division to service their print clients. “We transitioned the video and television design group to additionally produce Interactive CD-ROMs. We built the countries first ticketing kiosk for American Airlines and upon the early inception of the web, built "condomworld.com", one of the worlds' first E-commerce sites.”
O’Toole admits, “Although the Midwestern company gasped at the subject matter, they saw the potential of the internet combined with the power of good television designers.” After a few great successes, the postproduction houses were sold off. The Boston remained to continue doing Broadcast Television Design and Multimedia and became The DI Group.
During those twelve years, she initiated Producers Group with the State Film Commission and an AICP Group. She left The DI Group to go back to school. Kathy earned a Graduate Certificate in Multimedia and Computer Science from Harvard learning Unix, C++ and Object Oriented Programming. “After graduating with pain, I was offered a job at Cohen Gebler Associates.” As Executive Producer, she oversaw web and multimedia projects for Scott Adam's and the Dilbert characters.
She later moved on to Ingalls Advertising as Executive Producer overseeing the development of Citizensbankonline.com, 21stcentury.com, raytheon.com, pileandcompany.com and the redesign of Ingalls own site.
While VP for a dot.com company, which employed four thousand workers, O’Toole lead a team who built a six million dollar web site for Chase Manhattan Bank and was voted one of the top 100 Multimedia Producers in the country by Multimedia Magazine.
Years earlier, as cameraman for the Jerry Lewis Telethon, she met Tom Sprague, present owner of National Boston (NB). After four months as a NB contractor, O’Toole stepped in full time by March of 2002. “My role was to develop Interactive DVD services. We were, and are, still way ahead of our time in that arena, specifically High Definition Technology.”
Her success? She surrounds herself with professionals and listens to them. O’Toole’s NMD producer, Abby Motejl qualifies, “she is very receptive to my ideas. And takes them into consideration before she makes decisions.” And she gives her all. Steve Ball, Flame artist, says, “It (O’Toole’s energy) is positive, very professional. You feel like you are dealing with a true professional."
Online, offline, out there and in here... National Boston does it all, and Kathy O’Toole is their Managing Director. She is a refreshing balance of femininity, humor and intelligence.
For more info: www.nationalboston.com and www.getnmd.com