cathy oved

My Journey

Hotel Consultant, TripActions

January 2020 - March 2020

I had the exciting opportunity to join a newly launched Consulting division at TripActions. In this role, I advised mid-market and enterprise customers ranging in $5M to 20M in travel spend. I analyzed hotel booking data for dozens of mid-market and enterprise customers to determine optimal strategies and negotiating opportunities that drive increased savings. Our team solicited bids from over 500 hotels on behalf of customers, consolidated the resulting data (room rates, amenities, cancellation policies, etc.), and presented it to customers for preferred hotel selection. We often helped with the on-going program management to ensure that the hotels that were selected were performing according to the company's standards.

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Tools I learned: Lanyon, Sabre, Trello

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Customer Success Manager, TripActions

October 2018 - December 2019

When I moved to Palo Alto, I was thrilled to find TripActions - a fast growing travel technology company backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures. In my first two weeks, we had raised our series C and six months later, our series D. It was an eye-opening experience to see the company grow from 300 employees to 1,200+.

As a Customer Success Manager, I was accountable for on-boarding, engagement, and retention of 11 customers representing $30M in travel budget. In this role, I conducted quarterly business reviews with key customer stakeholders (CEOs, CFOs, Traveler Managers, etc.) summarizing their teams’ usage, spend, savings, and opportunities to drive further adoption on TripActions. On an on-going basis, I monitored and analyzed customer adoption across departments and identified opportunities to increase bookings by way of email outreach, additional trainings, and re-launch strategies.

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This was an incredibly valuable experience as it helped me overcome my fear of data. I never considered myself "analytical," and now I am thrilled to share that I look forward to "looking under the hood!"

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Tools I learned: Tableau, Grafana, Guru, Gong.io, Zendesk, Metabase, Snowflake, CirrusInsight

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Strategy & Business Development, Hospitality House

October 2015 - September 2018

At Hospitality House (HH), I had interacted with a wide variety of companies ranging from real estate developers, private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, architectural firms, design studios, licensing agencies, restaurants groups, and more. 

In the various positions I held at HH, I was often focused on how can we grow our footprint, expand our reach and offer our food and beverage services globally. I worked on various projects ranging from managing existing new business, responding to RFPs, launching a licensing platform, starting an investment fund, and more. While working on these new initiatives, I was eager for more. I was offered the opportunity to train, enable, and manage a team of brokers and consultants to do their own business development. This in turn allowed me to implement workflows to track and streamline relationship management from lead stage to proposal stage for 1,000+ prospective clients. We were able to develop a pipeline of deal flow sourced by various individuals in the company. This was a pivotal moment for the company as we had systemized and enabled the entire organization as a sales engine.

My time at HH taught me to think like a small business owner, to always connect the dots and to surround myself with a strong ecosystem and community of like-minded individuals.

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Tools I learned: Upwork, G-Suite, Basecamp

Founder, Just A Jump Rope

August 2018 - Present

While beginning the job search in Palo Alto, I decided to launch my own company in a category that I have always been passionate about: accessible fitness.

Having become an avid jump roper, I came to appreciate how affordable and efficient of a workout it is (a rope is a one-time, small fixed fee and can be used many times and in any environment), and decided to create and sell my own branded jump rope (along with a stream of free content that I’d broadcast from my own Instagram account). As a result, Just A Jump Rope was born. By way of Shopify, Instagram, and zero marketing dollars, I sold over 200 jump ropes in my first year and discovered the thrill of identifying a new business opportunity and developing meaningful relationships with other business owners and operators (I sought advice from peers who had started businesses so that I could learn from their mistakes and successes).

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Tools I learned: LegalZoom, Shopify, TaxJar, Instagram

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