Mentors: MARKET POSITION
Summary of Qualifications A tech startup veteran with a diverse background in economics and music, Luke Rabin is an expert in the very first steps of turning ideas into excitingly simple products. Luke Rabin has had the rare opportunity to spend much of his career in the very first steps of some of Richmond’s most heavily funded tech startups. These hard-earned experiences on top of his background in economics from UVA and a stint in the music industry have made him extremely well prepared to help new teams navigate the uncertainty of creating new companies and products. After being both an in-house Product Manager and a consultant, Luke and his design partner Brandon Lewis started BLDR to put all of their lessons learned the hard way into an accelerated service for creating and validating new products. Luke’s experience and skillset are vital when it comes to problem and market validation, prototyping, messaging, and proving measurable traction without investing in code. Want to meet with this mentor? Talk with your Lead...
Summary of Qualifications As a fractional CMO Deborah helps organizations identify their brands, identify their key goals, and determine appropriate marketing strategies to achieve those goals. Throughout her career, she has worked in corporations, ad agencies and currently as an independent consultant. Deborah has worked with large organizations and smaller organizations. She gets involved in creating communications plans (external and internal), marketing plans, and the pieces and parts that make up marketing plans; as in strategies and tactics including branding, research, public relations, and advertising. Frequently, the first step is the most difficult. Helping clients understand what it is they are really offering, and why their product meets the need of the prospect better than the competition is not easy, but it is almost the most important step in the process. Without a clear grasp of the brand the marketing strategies may fall on deaf ears. Over her career, she has worked in the business 2 business arena, and business 2 consumer. She has worked with retail, tourism, education, health care, housing and the financial industries. Want to meet with this mentor? Schedule an...
Summary of Qualifications Doug is a veteran entrepreneur and consultant whose experience focuses on strategy, operations, analytics, and finance. He is a founding partner and owner of Gather, whose coworking spaces provide a community to more than 200 entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business people. Doug White spends his time solving business problems for entrepreneurs and their organizations. His background in physics, math, engineering and business gives him an ability to go beyond the easy, surface solution; to dig deeper and find unique answers to the problems that plague small businesses. He has a talent for making the complex simple and guiding others to see and understand the key that will solve their puzzle. He helps organizations develop strategies to take them to the next level, grasp what their financials are really telling them, develops metrics to keep track and measure what is important and fixes operational issues by finding the root cause of the problem. Doug has successfully led start-ups and turnarounds. He has been a part of executing acquisitions on both the buy side and the sell side. He has worked successfully in fields ranging from heavy duty manufacturing to sales and distribution, from consumer lending to investment brokerage. The common thread through each assignment is that Doug has been the catalyst for creating significant bottom line value and he can teach you his methods. He has specialized in taking businesses that were broken and fixing them or taking businesses that were successful and raising their performance to the next level. Currently, Doug works with his wife Polly at Whitestone Partners, their full-service small-business consulting firm. Together, they...
Summary of Qualifications Brooke is a proven entrepreneur and business strategist. She helps entrepreneurs of all types to start, grow, and save their small businesses. Brooke works with entrepreneurs to achieve optimal success in both their business and their lives. With experience in all types of businesses and roles, she can help you create a plan to save, grow, or launch your business. Unlike other consultants, Brooke focuses not only on setting up businesses for success, but also the success of the entrepreneurs running them. She evaluates everything from overall business strategy, to sales efforts and processes, to customer service and retention, as well as explore and implement solutions to let you work “on” your business instead of “in” it. In addition to her own knowledge and network, Brooke can educate you on grants, resources, and services that are available at little to no charge to entrepreneurs in the Richmond area. Whether you are struggling to solve one problem within your business, or would like to evaluate and grow all aspects of your business, Brooke can help you achieve optimum success, growth, and balance as a business and an entrepreneur. Brooke graduated Summa Cum Laude from Middlebury College in 2001 with degrees in Philosophy and Spanish. For the past 15 years, she’s gained experience and expertise in many areas of the business world, from sales to operations to process improvement, for all types of industries and companies. Through her experience at companies like UPS, Duncan-Parnell, and LeClair Ryan, Brooke has been exposed to and learned about many types of operations and management styles, which allows her to be flexible and...
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...
