Why did you decide to become a mentor?
After hiring and working with so many people over the years, I noticed I was naturally drawn to coaching and mentoring my employees and helping them develop their careers and skills. It was just the right move to connect with people outside my organizations and also open my mind to other professionals, from different areas and backgrounds, that wanted to either start their own endeavor or become better marketing executives, entrepreneurs or reach C-level positions. Then, I joined a couple volunteer mentoring projects locally in the area of which I live and eventually found MentorCruise.
How did you get your career start?
It definitely did not start as a marketer. I did a B.A. in Graphic Design and after I graduated, I started working at a custom publisher back in my hometown as an Art Assistant. I loved the job! Eventually I got more involved with photography and was promoted to Photography Editor and then, eventually, to Art Director. A few years later I moved to Spain and worked in a couple graphic and web design studios, before meeting my business partner and launching our own B2B startup back in 2012. It was bootstrapped and eventually the project grew with investment, new hires and lasted for 7 years. In that experience I got to act 360º in the business, from sales to production, operations, accounts management, CRM and eventually, Marketing. After that I joined another scaleup as a Head of Marketing and helped them grow sales between 8x to 20x in the two years I was with them. It was a great experience in the DTC area.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
Mostly my mentees are looking for mentorship for their career development within the entrepreneurship and marketing areas. I have mentees trying to grow their current business faster and encountering several challenges (personally and business-wise), others looking for guidance with education and career path and others wanting to leave their 9-to-5 and start their own ventures. What they all have in common is that they are extremely committed and very open about the struggles they are facing, which I find fascinating and allows me to help them in a much more complete way than sharing just the regular technical or strategic challenges that you would with a consultancy or coaching format.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
I believe the more fascinating story so far is from a current mentee I have, a young man with an engineering background that is getting into marketing and eventually wants to build his own marketing analytics startup. It just combines my two areas of expertise, which I find super exciting. But apart from that, he is very dedicated to getting the most out of the sessions we have and is very disciplined with learning new tools, technologies and marketing concepts – when I imagine most people would shy away from it or take it slower, he keeps his foot on the gas pedal. It’s just great working with him and he has been progressing really fast. I look forward to seeing where he is going to be in 6, 12 months from now.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
A lot of inspiration and new ways of thinking. I like building meaningful connections with my mentees and seeing their development and growth with time. Each one is different: they face different challenges, come from different professional and personal backgrounds, have different ways of going about things, etc. It just keeps my mind open and generates so many inputs. I like also preparing the sessions a lot and researching for tools or concepts that can help them, so in a way it is a way of studying on different topics I wouldn’t normally get in touch with or even know about if it wasn’t for those cases. In summary: keeps me fresh!
If you'd like to chat and get to know me more, feel free to visit my MentorCruise profile!