Elena Dexter

Experience

• 

  Media World Advertising Agency (advertising on transport)

  Nov 2004 - Mar 2005

  Business Development Manager / Corporate Account Manager / Project Manager

  I joined the Media World team as a Corporate Account Manager after one of those multi-step interview processes that took over 50 people through a variety of personality, logic, and communications tests. Starting with Account Management for advertising on transport, I soon got involved in client negotiations, collaborating with designers and producers to put together campaigns and coordinating delivery and placement of advertising materials. This position required a lot of cold-calling, which I found absolutely horrifying. To overcome the discomfort I decided to read everything I could find on sales and negotiation techniques, as well as to challenge myself to work on my public speaking. The process was painful, but the efforts paid off. Soon I successfully brought on-board a couple large clients the company had been chasing for a while. Though eventually becoming quite good at sales, I never enjoyed that work and decided that it wasn't for me. Show less

• 

  Gallery Group (outdoor advertising)

  Mar 2005 - Apr 2006

  Business Development Manager / Corporate Account Manager / Project Manager

  This position gave me an opportunity to fill a talent gap in the Business Department for Gallery Group, the second largest outdoor advertising company in Russia at a time. Their regional office had been looking for a Business Development Manager for months, interviewing lots of people with no success in meeting the expectations of the CEO. I got a job offer after what seemed like a pretty short conversation. As a result of working with a demanding boss, the company went through an array of short-term employees who tried filling in this position. That resulted in the company's relations with local and large national clients being almost non-existent. Having to start from scratch, in just a few months I filled the company's local billboard network to its full capacity. At the same time I started championing some process improvement initiatives and eventually was given the green light to go head. In a couple months I was given authority to expand the team, and later in the year won an award at the 2006 national corporate summit. The most valuable skill I gained while working at Gallery was planning. Outdoor advertising had draconian penalties for late placement, even just for one day. This position engraved time-management in my personality, and it has been a part of who I am ever since. My relationships with head-office managers couldn't have been better, clients were happy, and everything was operating efficiently. Seeing this success, competing agencies started making me offers. One offer, from a small family-run company caught my eye as a great opportunity to get more autonomy. Show less

• 

  Panorama Advertising Agency (outdoor advertising)

  Apr 2006 - Apr 2007

  Business Development Manager / Corporate Account Manager / Project Manager

  This position provided almost unlimited freedom and authority to make decisions related to advertising accounts management. The only condition for my continued employment was – results, which worked perfectly for me. My approach started bringing results almost immediately. I established relationships with new high-profile national clients. Shortly after coming on-board, an entire network of Panorama’s billboards sold out for the full year, but requests from clients kept coming. To satisfy this new demand, I negotiated partnerships with other local agencies and established a new funnel for buying advertising space in the city. This initiative took off, creating a new source of income that was almost equal to that generated by the company’s primary business. After overseeing the transition to this new period of financial success for Panorama, I felt that time has come to start something of my own. Show less

• 

  Optima Media Group (outdoor advertising, branding, web development)

  Apr 2007 - Apr 2012

  Founder / CEO / Product & Project Management Lead

  Working so closely with both local agencies and national clients, I noticed that there was a large gap between clients' requirements and the ways local agencies operated. In many cases, clients were buying advertising through middle-man national agencies instead of directly, resulting in more work on both sides and higher costs. My experience working with clients provided a clear understanding of their needs, so I decided to try starting a company that would provide services comparable with those of other large media-buying agencies, but with the added value of local knowledge and lower price. Great relationships with local billboard owners and expert knowledge of local markets gave me a huge competitive advantage, while a large professional network provided me with a pool of potential clients. In just a couple months I hired and trained additional help to keep up with all the demand. I couldn't believe that things were coming together so easily! It was a great experience, learning all aspects of running a business: hiring talent, building a work culture and process frameworks, strategic and financial planning, and applying all the other lessons learned in school and in practice. It felt amazing to experience the freedom of making decisions, and seeing my strategies work. The company was doing very well on the outdoor advertising front, and seeing another gap in the market I decided to start a web development agency. That was my introduction to software development. Trying to move quickly I was learning everything I could get my hands on: product management and development, SCRUM, software design, building and leading teams, implementing and tweaking processes. Both ventures continued to be very successful even managed remotely, after my move to Canada. However the economic recession of 2009 hit both industries the company operated in quite harshly and I found it impossible to maintain relationships with clients without physically being there. Show less

• 

  Virtual World Web Inc.

  May 2012 - Feb 2019

  To formalize my already existing level of involvement with the company, my title was changed to Executive Director. Though, I still continued managing our product and development teams. It has been a challenging but rewarding period of maintaining the momentum of this venture. Throughout this process, I have had the opportunity to take over responsibilities of managing Human Resources and acting as the company's Hiring Manager, figuring out how to compete for the best talent in Vancouver's emerging tech market, and took over management of the company's Operations, including people and work culture initiatives. I also got to work on the company's investment presence and due diligence rounds. I truly loved this job, but I started really itching for a new venture of my own and after a couple years decided to make the jump. Show less With taking on this role, I got an opportunity to have almost unlimited autonomy in terms of driving our product development initiatives, and I am not gonna lie – I loved it. It has been incredible to watch our CEO's dream turn into a complex and powerful platform. Now, all that was left was to share it with the world. After a company restructuring, multi-talented employees became of special value and my extensive list of skills and talents came really handy. In addition to my existing responsibilities I took over management of our Game Design, Community Management and QA Teams and preparation of our SR&ED filings. As our team has gotten smaller, but our workload grew I stepped in to apply things that worked for our development team on a company-wide level and designed a work framework based on just-enough process philosophy and results-only mindset. It worked wonders, yet again. Show less I first joined this team when the company started development of the new virtual world platform. Very quickly this project became my baby. I got very involved in product vision and design from the early stages, and over the years invested a lot of my time and energy into shaping its direction. This position gave me autonomy to build, lead, and evolve cross-functional teams of 3 to 15 people. Moving the talent employed with the company around, and ensuring their skills and knowledge were utilized in the best possible way, was a bit of a process, though the result was worth it. Doing so brought new excitement into many people's careers, and I truly believe that happy people are exponentially more productive. From there I moved to identifying what talent was still missing and led the process of hiring new people to complete the team. During this time I decided to try a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) approach to management. Making that switch was scary, but it worked brilliantly! I am very proud of building a workplace people bragged to their friends about. These were a few challenging but amazing years of 12 - hour workdays, making things work last second, getting better at planning and scoping; but also failing, leading, learning, tweaking, and admiring how much we were able to achieve, and how much still had to be done! Show less

  • Executive Director

    Jun 2016 - Feb 2019

  • Director Product Development

    Jul 2014 - May 2016

  • Product Development Lead

    May 2012 - Jul 2014
• 

  AllBright Designs Inc

  Nov 2016 - now

  CEO / Co-Founder / Head of Product

  AllBright Designs was founded out of a wish to help traditional industries take advantage of incredible capabilities modern technology has to offer. We worked to design simple, refreshing software that enhances people’s capabilities and helps companies be more productive. It felt incredible to have the autonomy to make business decisions again and build a team of bright, intelligent and highly skilled people. At the same time, it was a lot of fun to have an opportunity to design our signature product Modello (https://www.modello.app/) from the ground up based on our own vision, do a great job on a thin but polished MVP and go through the boardrooms of the largest real estate developers in the city collecting such warm feedback. The CoVid pandemic forced us to re-think our plans, but I am incredibly proud of the company and product we built and maybe someday we will pick things up where we left them. Show less

• 

  Work.Smarter

  Nov 2019 - now

  Founder / Coach

  At that point in my career, I wanted two things: flexibility and purpose behind projects I was working on. After a lot of thinking I landed on trying my hand at coaching. Over the years I noticed that many startups go through the same struggles with converting early startup chaos into a productive way of working. At the same time, that happened to be something that always came to me very naturally and I LOVED doing it. I started my coachign practice with a goal to help early tech startups learn how to manage teams in a light, simple and effective way and build work cultures people loved being a part of. As a side-effect of doing that, I came up with an idea for an online course that applied principles I used for managing startup teams in a completely different setting - the lives of solopreneurs. This is how The Path to Work-Life Harmony was born. It is extremely fulfilling to help solopreneurs establish comfortable, sustainable work-life routines that make them feel amazing about the work they do and about the lives they live. I have been coaching and mentoring people at the workplace for years, but educating outside of that was my long-standing wish and I am ecstatic that I am finally doing it! Starting to think about packaging what I know generated a whole backlog of ideas for other courses and coaching programs that I would love to bring to life over the next few years. Show less