I started in marketing at 18 as an intern. I knew I wanted to be an executive one day, and I was curious and willing to outwork almost anyone in the room. Over the next 20 years, that curiosity took me from intern to Vice President of Marketing: leading teams of 25 international marketers, spanning SaaS, technology, and industrial sectors, across more than two dozen countries.
Four of those senior roles had something in common: when I arrived, marketing wasn't working. Not because the teams weren't talented. Because the strategy was unclear, the messaging didn't connect, the functions were misaligned, and nobody had been willing to say it plainly. My job, every time, was to walk in, figure out what was actually broken, and rebuild from there.
I got very good at it.
Then I experienced it from the inside.
The same pattern I was diagnosing in organizations was running quietly in me. I was the person everyone called when things were broken, and I said yes, and yes, and yes again, because I was good at it and it felt like the right thing to do. Until it didn't.
What came out of that is Brilliance Not Burnout, a book written not from a therapeutic remove but from the middle of it: the burnout, the reckoning, the rebuild. I wrote it for the professional woman who gets called superwoman and smiles and changes the subject, because I was her, and nobody told me the truth.
Why one person does three things.
People sometimes ask how the consulting, the writing and speaking, and the teaching fit together. The honest answer is that I stopped being able to separate them.
A student once asked me why a company would spend money on brand awareness if it couldn't be traced directly to revenue. I had answered that question in a boardroom six months earlier, fighting for a budget line that finance wanted to cut. The student's question was sharper than the boardroom version because she had no political reason to accept a soft answer. That exchange changed how I made the argument in the next client meeting.
The consulting sharpens the teaching. The teaching sharpens the consulting. And the writing is where I work out what I believe about both: the pattern I keep seeing, the thing I want to say plainly, the question more leaders should be sitting with.
The credentials, for those who need to see them.
I'm based in Forsyth County, Georgia. Five of seven continents, four of five oceans, and a strong preference for experiencing a place rather than visiting it.
Gina is an incredibly detail-oriented and marketing-savvy individual. Her work is always meticulously and beautifully crafted. I was lucky to have worked with her and learned from her.
If something here landed.
The consulting work, the book, the speaking, the teaching: they all start with the same question. What's actually going on here, and what would it take to change it.
If that's a question you're sitting with right now, I'd like to hear about it.
Email me at gina@makeitwithmindset.comStart the conversation
If something here landed, I'd like to hear what you're sitting with right now.
Prefer email? Reach me directly at gina@makeitwithmindset.com.