Mentors: MARKETING
Summary of Qualifications Brian Beard is the founder of River City Food Tours. He spent 4 years working at Capital One as an analyst, and the last 3 years running his own business, currently ranked the #1 Tour in Richmond on TripAdvisor. Brian moved to Richmond in 2009 to work as an analyst at Capital One for operations and marketing teams. His role was to use data to drive decisions that would influence the way customers interacted with their credit card company. Seeking a change (and a move away from a traditional 9-5) he founded River City Food Tours. For Brian, starting RCFT was a way to move out of a desk job, and into something more fun, but he had no idea just how awesome it would be! The business has allowed Brian to get involved in Richmond in so many ways – he gets to show off the city to food tour guests, and he gets to work with other small business owners every day. Brian has also joined BreakawayRVA as one of its founding members. One of the challenges of working in small businesses is the lack of data compared with the abundance available in his former role at Capital One. As a result, Brian has fine-tuned his intuition when it comes to business strategy, marketing plans, and the execution of both. Want to meet with this Lead Mentor? Schedule A...
Summary of Qualifications Paul is the local River City King with King of Pops. Armed with just a cart and some handcrafted ice-pops, he started slinging pops to the good people in Richmond in 2012. Since then, the business has grown to 10 carts, 3 full-time employees and 25+ part timers in the summer. Paul’s unique perspective comes from having done every job within the business possible; from making pops, to selling on the sidewalks, to accounting, training employees, social media, marketing and advertising… he’s done it all and he sees how everything works together to achieve his business goals. Having a business that relies heavily on customer service and interaction, he began to see the close relationship marketing has with management. He understands how to fully exploit both to create a fun, awesome culture for his employees to then create the fun vibe King of Pops is known for. Paul once said “numbers kick ass” which could be an odd thing for a person who self-proclaims that he “isn’t a numbers guy.” It was in reference to how his business shifted dramatically and positively once he started managing his business according “buzz-word” things like Key Performance Indicators or metrics. Paul says it is the “least sexy” part of a business, but it is the “most important” part if you want to be successful and not “work insane hours the rest of your life.” Also a former teacher, he’s seen countless lessons he learned teaching students overlap “almost identically” with challenges he’s seen in the business world with managing employees, customers, and himself in the workplace. Random achievement: He once...
Summary of Qualifications Leah Fremouw is a familiar face in the Richmond business community and has a rich history of managing dynamic, fast-moving projects with multiple stakeholders. Leah currently serves as an Assistant Vice President at Virginia Community Capital, a financial organization deploying loans and advisory services to projects in all regions of the Commonwealth. In this role, she partners with businesses in a variety of industries and growth stages to support their movement to the next level. Prior to this role, she led talent management and cultural initiatives for CarLotz, a fast growing Richmond business, served as an organizational development consultant with the Performance Management Group at Virginia Commonwealth University, and for three years worked in the city’s public housing communities. Leah’s commitment to the Richmond community brings her out of the office and into initiatives moving the greater region forward. She helps lead TEDxRVA, the innovative speaker series initiated in 2012, along with Impact 100, where she supports strategies to raise large grant funds for local nonprofits. Leah earned her Bachelors and Master’s degrees at VCU, where she was recognized as an L. Douglas Wilder Graduate Scholar 2008-2010. She is also a 2011 graduate of the Partnership for Nonprofit Excellence’s Emerging Nonprofit Leaders Program. Want to meet with this mentor? Schedule an...
Summary of Qualifications Rebecca is a veteran entrepreneur with experience in real estate, retail and most recently, restaurants. She is the founder of kybecca, a 150 seat restaurant and was a partner in a real estate firm. Rebecca opened kybecca in 2005 as a small retailer focusing on small production wine and beer. Over the years that expanded into a wine bar, and then a small restaurant. Today, kybecca is 150 seat restaurant with a craft cocktail bar. Through these various incarnations and receiving mentorship of her own, the concept continues to grow and evolve to meet the needs of her clientele and fill a distinctive niche in the market. Restaurants, in particular, are challenging due to the volume of moving parts and decisions that each affect the bottom line. Her experience in building the business from the ground up, sustaining it and evolving it to meet a changing marketplace has enabled her to understand how important it is to set your enterprise up correctly. Structure sets success. She can provide mentorship in all aspects of understanding your business: each component, how they work together and where to focus your efforts to ensure profitability and steady growth. While not a specialist in marketing, working with Rebecca can improve your marketing efforts. Often businesses aren’t sure where profitability lies within their offerings. Narrowing what the customer wants and how to tell them about it has the result of quickly improving the bottom line. Rebecca has developed real estate for specific use both in residential and commercial, worked with cities to secure incentives, scouted locations, created a concept and brought it to...
Summary of Qualifications Grant is a Fractional Product & Marketing Manager, specializing in small to mid business growth through customer engagement and product innovation. Grant Mizell’s career spans traditional advertising, PR, community management, digital strategy, SEM/PPC and product development. Most recently, acting as Head of Product, he oversaw the transformation of PartyRVA, a successful and award-winning prototype e-marketplace for group planners, into OccasionGenius, overhauling the customer conversion funnel, shifting the business model and repositioning for national scale. A graduate of VCU’s Advertising program, he uses a foundation in conceptual thinking and design as a heightened UX perspective in targeting business growth opportunities through user-centered engagement and innovation. In 2013, he traded in 7 years of Adjunct instruction at VCU Advertising, for a leadership role on the Byrd Theatre Foundation. Grant serves as Vice President and Programming Chair, where he applies lean startup mentality to marketing and new program development, in support of the 87-year-old institution’s evolution into a center for film and film literacy. Want to meet with this mentor? Talk with your Lead...
