Late Fall 2018
November 09, 2018
Carlos is the the Chief Strategy Officer of two bootstrapped, founder-led organizations: Travelers Haven and Hotel Engine. Travelers Haven is the 4th largest corporate housing company in the US. Hotel Engine is a online B2B hotel booking platform.
What career experiences led you to your current role?
I started my career in operations at General Electric and Kimberly-Clark. From those jobs I learned a lot of hard skills (e.g. Six Sigma, problem solving, project management, etc.) but also had a few great managers who pushed me to learn soft skills (e.g. leading without authority, facilitation, change management, etc.). From there, I went on to pursue an MBA at Harvard to expand my knowledge base beyond operations and, after graduating, I joined Fluke Electronics and performed a variety of roles in sales and marketing. I was able to apply my ops background to increase sales, improve margin, launch new products, and, overall, improve our return on investment by finding relationships between inputs and outputs. On my last role at Fluke, I gained a lot of experience optimizing demand generation and inside sales which allowed me to consult for other Danaher (Fluke’s parent corporation) operating companies. After a couple of those engagements, I decided to resign and pursue that type of consulting on my own, so I founded Vortice Services. Unfortunately, going on your own typically means that 90%+ of the job entails selling your products/services and the remainder is actually doing what you set out to do. So I decided to go back to an operating company, first Amazon and now my current employer, a company I consulted for while at Vortice Services.
What is that you do on a daily basis?
My role as Chief Strategy officer includes a combination of looking ahead and execution, but there are typically two other types of strategy roles: 3rd party partnerships/relationships and long-range outward looking planning. However, smaller organizations like ours with 175 combined employees live and die by execution, so my role revolves around organizational speed. As such, I currently lead the marketing, human resources, operations and strategic planning functions.
What you like most about your job
Working at a smaller company (105 employees when I joined) has a lot of professional benefits: less red-tape, more execution, and ability to build processes and systems from scratch. This is my first non-Fortune 100 job and now, in hindsight, it’s what I was craving: driving change in a fast-paced environment without substantial corporate bureaucracy. In a company like ours, you also have to constantly bounce between strategic thinking and tactical execution, so there’s never a boring day! But, we’re not for everybody – earlier in my career I needed more structure, coaching, training, and other guardrails that large corporations can provide.
What advice you would give a student considering a similar career
A common misconception is that entrepreneurs are risk seekers, but some of the best entrepreneurs I’ve met are actually risk-averse; they just know which calculated risks they should take, know when to pull out of an idea that doesn’t work, and learn from their mistakes fairly quickly. When I started the sales/marketing consulting firm, it was a big leap for me. After all, I had only worked in Fortune 100 organizations, had great employee benefits, and a pretty comfortable safety net. From an outsider’s perspective, it looked like a risky move; however, it was a calculated leap with careful planning in case it didn’t work out. For example, if I didn’t have my first customer by a predetermined point in time, I would go back to the job hunt while making sure that I stayed proactively connected with my network. With that said, I guess my advice is to take calculated risks. Too many people never take any and others take them recklessly.