Diana Lee is the cofounder and CEO of Constellation Agency.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, car sales are at an all-time high with dealerships making more money than ever before. Enter Diana Lee. With more than 30 years of automotive sales and marketing experience, Lee has left her mark on a traditionally male-dominated industry. She is the cofounder and CEO of Constellation Agency, a hybrid digital marketing agency and SaaS company whose proprietary Alexia software launches and manages hyper-targeted campaigns at scale.
Since its founding in 2016, Lee and her business partner Matt Woodruff have built Constellation into a more than $20 million revenue company without taking on any outside investments. They’re on track to more than double that figure in 2021 with 300 percent month-over-month growth. Clients include BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volkswagen and more.
Alexia launches and manages targeted ad campaigns at scale, revolutionizing how automotive companies, dealers and CPG brands can reach consumers on a hyper-local level. Beyond leading clients toward a more efficient method of advertising, Alexia guides the advertising and marketing industry forward by creating a set pricing model. This in turn decreases marketing fee spend while providing superior results.
Lee is one of few women executives in automotive. Fewer than 2% of women in the industry are Asian.
Lee started her career in automotive sales and worked in the industry for over 30 years before bootstrapping Constellation Agency into a multimillion-dollar company. Realizing the inefficiencies in automotive advertising, especially at the individual dealer level, she cofounded the company with Matt Woodruff, a former strategist at Oglivy and Mather. They quickly pivoted from ad agency to tech company with the development of Constellation's proprietary software, Alexia.
“When I first started Constellation, I didn't have a full roadmap of exactly what I wanted the company to become, I just had an idea and a great business partner,” says Lee. In the past five years, Constellation has been flexible and adapted to fit the needs of clients and the advertising and marketing industry.
Alexia originally was created as an internal tool for the Constellation team. But when Lee and Woodruff realized they could license the software, they jumped. “Alexia enables agencies to disrupt the traditional ‘billable hours’ model and launch in the leanest way possible,” Lee explains. “Software is replacing the vicious cycle of agencies scaling their output up and down with people. Agencies will be able to retain their top talent for years to come when they use Alexia to scale their ads instead of their employees.”
Lee was honored as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2021.
As one of the few Asian American women in the automotive industry, Lee says she always has been working hard to prove her value. This determination translated into her building and growing Constellation Agency, rated the number 65 fastest-growing private company in the U.S. by Inc. Magazine, the seventh fastest-growing advertising/marketing company on the Inc. 5000, and tenth fastest-growing woman led company.
“In 2019, men held over 75% of the jobs in the automotive industry. Of the 23.6% of women in the industry, only 1.8% were Asian women,” Lee says. In 1989, when she first entered the industry as a 19-year-old Asian college student, the gender breakdown was not even that generous. “In such an environment I was at a disadvantage, not being treated with the same respect as my male counterparts. My success had to be entirely merit-based. I needed to be the best at what I did, otherwise there was no chance of progressing my career.”
At 25, she was promoted to finance manager at another dealership. Most of the sales people were double her age and all of them were men. On her first day at work, one of the men came into her office, threw a file at her and said, “Girl, build this out.” Lee was his supervisor. She had to prove she was someone worth respecting. So, she grabbed the folder, ran after him in the showroom, and in front of everybody ripped the file into tiny pieces, threw it in the air and said, “You made a mistake. You need to start over again.” From then on, her colleagues called her “the iron butterfly.”
These days, Lee is committed to building and fostering an inclusive and diverse team to help pave the way for other women and minorities in the automotive industry. At Constellation, a dedicated lawyer helps international employees get their H1B visas to work at the company. Some 49% of Constellation Agency’s employees are women, 50% of the executive leaders are women, and 25% of the executives are women of color.
In May 2020, Constellation Agency launched the Do Good Auto Coalition, a non-profit designed to push auto dealerships to help local communities. Already it has facilitated the donation of over 750,000 pounds of food and provided over 600,000 meals. The NGO is sponsored by Constellation along with participation from Maserati, NBCUniversal, Automotive News and Elizabeth Elting Foundation and has partnered with leading automotive dealers across the country.
Lee has these simple words of advice for other social entrepreneurs: “Never accept ‘no’ for an answer.
