CONTINOUSLY ADAPTING 

Never take anything for granted 

My roots run deep in New York City. Born in Brooklyn, I’ve lived in four of the five boroughs, shaped by the city’s energy and diversity. As a first-generation American raised by Ukrainian grandparents, I’ve always had a multicultural lens on the world.

At home, I spoke Ukrainian—but my global journey began early. At age four, I moved to a working-class neighborhood outside Buenos Aires. In just one year, I fully adapted to the local culture—my Spanish fluency became so natural that I was indistinguishable from the neighborhood kids.

Years later, after attending St. George Academy on the Lower East Side and graduating Eastchester High School in Westchester County I spent a transformative year in London pursuing my A Levels. Though we shared a language, British culture challenged me to adjust to a new rhythm and worldview—refining my ability to adapt, observe, and integrate without losing my sense of self.

BUILDING THE CORE

A strong work ethic is the bedrock of my personal and professional life

From delivering newspapers in grade school to bagging groceries and slicing deli meats in high school, to working night shifts and parking cars on City Island during college—I’ve never shied away from hard work. Even with a packed schedule, I always made time for the things that kept me grounded: playing clarinet and saxophone (First Chair and Seat in 6th grade), committing to team sports like basketball and football, and staying active with a close-knit circle of friends and teammates.

My first taste of the professional world came through an internship at the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York in the Technical Services Group. Programming production schedules and managing supplies taught me the real-world value of operational efficiency and attention to detail.

After college, I began my career at Addison as a marketing administrative assistant. I quickly saw an opportunity to improve how we worked. Within months, I digitized the entire marketing process—from direct mail to lead follow-ups—by building a relational database. I was determined to never file a piece of paper again. My efforts led to a promotion to Marketing Associate, and after three years, I joined a startup called Hadtke Design as a Client Manager.

At Hadtke, I handled client work by day and modernized the office by night—introducing case digital studies, presentation templates, digital projection tools, and the company’s first email system. It was a crash course in transformation and ownership, one that shaped the way I think about building and scaling teams and systems today.

PROFESSIONALIZING SKILLS

Creating spaces for strategy, creativity and process 

As I evolved into a jack-of-all-trades, strategy frameworks and a disciplined creative process became essential tools in my toolkit.

My first “real” consulting role was with Lippincott, then part of Marsh & McLennan’s professional services division. The early months were rocky—fast-paced, intense, and demanding—but I endured. Over time, I developed a core set of consulting and critical thinking skills: writing discussion guides and conducting interviews, shaping qualitative and quantitative research, crafting brand strategies and presentation decks, generating brand names and creative briefs, managing clients, and building brand architecture, migration strategies, and communications roadmaps.

After four years in Lippincott’s New York office, I transitioned to Mercer’s Boston office. Though I continued commuting to New York several days a week, the move helped me shed my NYC shell and gain new perspective.

I soon joined Interbrand, recruited by the person who would become a lifelong mentor. Eager to solve problems across a wide range of industries, I dove into challenging work—earning a reputation for having the “right temperament” to navigate complexity and manage difficult clients. One defining moment came during a high-stakes presentation to a CEO entrenched in an ongoing PR crisis. The CEO, visibly upset, challenged our findings. I held my ground, walking through our rationale with clarity and confidence. By the end, it became clear his frustration wasn’t with our conclusions—it was with how far the company had drifted from his original vision after a corporate spin-off.

Not every client engagement was this charged, but a consistent theme began to emerge: I could be counted on to deliver under pressure, navigate tough conversations, and help organizations solve their most pressing brand and business challenges.

DESIGNING TEAMS AND ROLES

When everyone understands their role and is setup for success, culture thrives, attrition fades and strategic creativity is unleashed.

After my first 18 months at Interbrand New York, I was offered a short-term opportunity in Interbrand’s Singapore office. What began as a six-week assignment ultimately turned into a transformative two-year journey. Though I arrived without a formal mandate to lead, it became clear early on that building trust and driving impact would require stepping up.

The strategy team in Singapore included eight consultants working alongside 20 creative and operations professionals. As I engaged with clients and prospects, I began assembling agile, cross-functional squads tailored to each client engagement. We experimented with high-touch workshops to extract richer customer insights and deepen client collaboration. Along the way, we developed strategic frameworks to bring consistency and clarity to our approach. Over time, confidence soared—and so did performance. We embraced a model of co-creating solutions with clients, which became a core part of our ethos.

A defining moment involved two senior strategists who often clashed over capabilities. I placed them on the same project team — and the conflict dissolved. Their competitive energy turned into mutual respect, and their collaboration elevated the work. Shortly after, the office head asked if I’d like to redesign the physical office layout. A few months later, I was named Head of Strategy.

Looking back, building a high-performing team feels intuitive—but in reality, it required patience, protection, empathy, and imagination. When I left Singapore, every member of the strategy team went on to secure senior-level, regional, or global marketing roles across a range of industries—a testament to the strength and growth of the team we built together.

ADAPTING TO LOCAL CULTURE 

Humans are more similar than different.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked on regional and multi-market brands—but it wasn’t until nearly two decades in that I took on my first truly global assignment. The client was the world’s third-largest Japanese automaker, part of a global alliance with a European brand. Our task: synthesize all existing brand research, fill the gaps with third-party data, and build a brand measurement framework that could inform regional priorities.

The project was complex and spanned 18 months. It required designing a scalable framework, securing buy-in from local intelligence and business leaders, and piloting in key markets. While we weren’t granted permission to roll up insights into a single global view, we empowered individual teams to assess the true competitive health of their brands—and take action, often beyond the realm of traditional marketing.

What I learned about human behavior and local nuance during that project proved invaluable when I was later asked to help onboard a new CEO in our China office. The mandate was simple: stabilize the team and the client base. In Singapore, people were initially wary—seeing me as a corporate plant. In Shanghai and Beijing, there was even less desire to engage.

I joked with the new CEO that if I didn’t get onto a project soon, I’d start metaphorically tackling team members in the hallway. Thankfully, an opportunity presented itself. The head strategist was fielding constant, unreasonable requests from global offices—some bordering on abusive. We sat down, created use cases to demonstrate the true costs and impact of those requests, and built a toolkit that framed options, clarified roles, and established appropriate fees. Our approach brought immediate clarity—and respect. From that point forward, I was welcomed into the broader strategy and creative teams.

Ironically, China had never been a market I imagined spending much time in. But as I lived and traveled through cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, I encountered the same warmth, pride, and entrepreneurial drive I had seen in Singapore, Gurgaon, Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Jakarta, and Manila. It was a reminder: if you take the time to set aside preconceptions and truly connect with people, the differences shrink—and the shared human values shine through.

EMBRACING A LIFELONG LEARNING JOURNEY

From the moment we’re born to the moment we pass, life is a continuous journey of learning 

When your daily focus shifts from one person—yourself—to four, life takes on a new dimension. Having children challenges your physical and mental boundaries in ways you never expect, yet it becomes one of the most profound and rewarding experiences imaginable. I’ve been fortunate to witness my children explore, learn, and begin to excel in physical, academic, and creative pursuits. That sense of innocence—and the courage to start with a blank page—reignited my own ambitions and reframed the roles I saw myself playing.

After leaving Interbrand, I used the time to reset and refocus my career. I applied my skills in new and modern ways: building a B2B strategy vertical within a consumer-focused research company, taking on complex brand architecture projects that large agencies typically passed over, and strengthening my expertise in digital marketing, product development, and user experience.

As I was up-leveling my skillset, I joined Ogilvy Consulting in a role with a sharp focus: building brand architectures driven by customer needs and aligned to business outcomes. For the first time in my career, I had a very narrow scope—which allowed me to go deep. What many saw as a “clean up and organize your portfolio” task, I transformed into a strategic process. I developed and refined an approach tied directly to a client’s business ambitions—one that encouraged organizations to think in terms of customer-centric ecosystems rather than static brand charts. This work reshaped how organizations understood, managed, and activated the power of their brands.

Now, as my chapter at Ogilvy Consulting concludes, I’m ready to take on the emerging challenges facing organizations and brands. Whether as a consultant or a member of a client team, I’m prepared to integrate the power of AI with my global, multi-industry, and brand expertise to fuel growth and create lasting competitive advantage.

Knowledge and experience matter—but the real discipline lies in focusing on where you're headed, not where you've been. Ready to roll.