As he morphed from Professional Hockey Player into Power BI afficionado, Félix has learned to leverage his passion for structure and organization to manage projects across a wide range of stakeholders. We loved hearing his story!
Sara: Tell us a little about your career journey and how you ended up with us at Simplicity!
Félix: My career had an unusual start to it. I was a professional hockey player for five years, and I was fortunate enough while I was playing to get scholarships to go to school. I did my bachelor’s degree in Canada, and I did my MBA in the UK while I was playing there. I wanted to be able to get an education so I would have something to focus on after playing professional hockey. Then I met my wife, moved to the US, and realized how hard networking truly was. I saw Simplicity when I was looking for consulting agencies and right away, I saw the professionalism of Simplicity - it was on another level in comparison to other agencies that I talked to. I immediately thought, “Ok, these, these people are the people I want to work with”. So that's honestly how I ended up at Simplicity: a little bit of luck, and I felt that Simplicity was (and is) better than other agencies out there.
Sara: What have you enjoyed about consulting and doing this role in particular?
Félix: With my first contract, Simplicity knocked it out of the park. I wish I could work with this team forever. In this role, a big part of what I love is my manager, Claire. Claire is honestly- she's amazing. She provides the type of leadership that I perform well under; she's very transparent and straightforward. When there is something wrong, she tells you. Especially with how big a corporation Microsoft is, I've seen with a lot of other colleagues that they're trying to be politically correct and there are a lot of you know, things that you can and cannot say. But Claire's team has been great. And the fact that I'm get to work with Kayleen - she's been a great mentor. I like what I'm doing - working with a lot of different stakeholder teams like marketing sales, data analytics - we're filling this little gap that Microsoft didn't even realize they needed to fill.
Sara: What are you looking for in your next role?
Félix: I really enjoy project management. I'm someone who's very structured, which probably stems from my background playing professional sports and going to school at the same time - it's a skill I had to develop. You have to figure it out. You know you have the schedule. You stick with it. You have to be disciplined with it. In some projects that I'm managing, I know my experience as an athlete has been very beneficial for me. I also love data analytics part - because numbers don't lie. In my current role, we provide insights and then we give them to sales, and we consistently get positive feedback from our sales partner - the insights are helping them to do their job better and more efficiently, with greater accountability.
Sara: Right. If you met someone out in the world and you were networking and they said “oh, I'm at my job and I don't really like it and I don't know what to do next”, would you recommend consulting for them? And if they were unsure about it, what advice would you give them?
Félix: I would definitely suggest they explore not just any consulting, but I would tell them to go, from my experience, to go to talk to the people at Simplicity. I've said to many people that Simplicity is the way to go if they want to consult. I would also say that success comes down to having structure, and having a plan which you can fall back on if needed, because it's true that sometimes budgets change and you need to make sure you're covered if there's a gap.
Sara: There's definitely the potential for a lot of variety when you're consulting too.
Félix: True - as much as I love my current role, there's the possibility that maybe my next contract is going to be totally different than the one I have now, and maybe I'm going to love it. Maybe doing something I didn't know I even wanted to do. So, it's really all about the open possibilities of being a consultant. That's definitely a huge plus because you get more exposure to different things. You learn more skills with every contract.
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