Eden Sexton

I attribute my success to a combination of steadfast focus and the support of mentors, colleagues, and my network. By staying clear on my goals and prioritizing what truly matters, I am able to drive meaningful results while navigating complex challenges. Equally important is the guidance and encouragement I’ve received from others, which has allowed me to grow professionally, take calculated risks, and seize opportunities that align with my passion for education and impact.

As a woman, if you do not speak up in the first 5 minutes, they will assume you're the admin. This advice has been crucial for me throughout my career, especially working in the management consulting space where I often find myself in rooms with very impressive people from prestigious programs like Columbia Business School. Coming from a background as a classroom physics teacher, I've had to combat imposter syndrome, which is very real. But I've learned that showing up and speaking up immediately is essential. I work in a field where the gender gap still exists, and even though my organization is balanced at exactly half and half with a woman owner, I've had to learn to assert myself from the start of every meeting to be taken seriously and to best represent both my organization and myself as a person.

Go get it. In EdTech in particular, it's a field that's made for women. It wasn't built by women, but it's made for women. We, as natural educators and nurturers, really care about our end user, especially if it's children or someone in an educational journey - that's the whole point of ed tech. We really care about their future, so we sell instinctively. Our EQ comes in handy because we can craft a story in a way that really lands with the audience, which are also people who are educators and very much care about their students. If your values are that the user or the student has the best experience and has the best potential outcome for the future, then you could sell till the cows come home. It's meaningful and impactful, and it's not like a used car salesman - it's actually people who care and value and want to provide solutions. The transactional piece of sales is such a small part of it. This work is about changing the narrative around what sales looks like.

AI is disrupting everything right now, and there's a lot of fear about not being prepared and what the firms are going to do. We work closely with the major consulting firms - for example, McKinsey reached out to us in December to leak information that they were moving their recruitment deadline up by 3 months, from July to just a few weeks away. The challenges are that the market is ever-changing, and getting students trained for AI expectations is a really big thing. We've heard from the firms that they feel like AI has watered down the candidate pool - there are studies showing that if you're using AI without really thinking about it, not prompt engineering it properly, you're basically letting the machine do the thinking for you and your brain is literally getting smaller. We're combating that by still trying to teach people to do the hard thing. Another major challenge is the misinformation out there. Mainstream media likes to write articles saying McKinsey is going to die or management consulting is going to die and AI is going to replace them, but we're not seeing that at all. We're actually seeing the industry grow 20% year over year. The truth is that generalist roles may have fewer spots, but if you understand and specialize in areas like supply chain or sports and entertainment, there's huge growth potential. Students and schools are hearing that no one wants to go into consulting because they're not hiring, but actually it's the opposite - you just have to specialize and position yourself correctly. People would rather hear that it's not going to work and not try rather than try and be disappointed. Our job is to tell people what the truth is, which is often counter to what the mainstream says.

Honesty and integrity are absolutely essential to me. Compassion is also critical - being able to think about what the other person is going through, truly sitting there and thinking about what they care about, what would be a win for them, and how we can make it also a win for us. I'm more transparent than I probably should be - it's kind of a fatal flaw of mine, but it works well in this industry because people don't usually get that level of honesty. When I do live trainings or consulting industry update calls for my career services partners, professors, and deans at our partner schools, I'm very honest and transparent. I think I sometimes say things that are slightly off-color, but they're true, and people appreciate that authenticity. I come from a very religious background, so being this honest and transparent is not like me used to be, but now I just am, and I think people really appreciate it. It's so important to be genuine and to truly care about creating win-win situations where we're thinking about the other person's needs and goals.