Haley Ashe

I'd probably say my parents. My upbringing and being the oldest child instilled a lot of my drive and initiative and motivation. My parents really encouraged myself and my sister growing up that success is earned, so you have to go out and you have to have that passion and drive, ultimately, to get to what you want. Having their sense of encouragement definitely resulted in me becoming the person I am today.

The best career advice I've ever received is to look at mistakes as an opportunity. We might make a mistake, something might go wrong, we might send out the wrong thing to some customers or something, but we take that as a positive learning moment. We learn from that, and we take that advantage to remember and reflect and build better processes and systems so that we don't do that again in the future. I try to instill that in my team, so there's not a fear of making mistakes either. We kind of look at mistakes as a positive thing in some regard.

I think to always be in other women's corner. I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of, as you'd say, girls' girls, supporting each other, but then I've also seen the opposite, where it can get a little competitive and we're tearing each other down. So my biggest piece of advice to other women is always just being in each other's corner. We already have other battles we're having to face, so the best thing we can do is just support each other along the way.

In the world of software, things move at a very, very fast pace because we're selling air, essentially, so there's not as extensive production timelines and things can move at a faster pace. On top of that, there's excitement for AI and the stuff we're doing, but that can also be a challenge too, because we're all learning it as we go and things are happening so fast. You're really having to stay up to date on the times, so you feel behind almost at times. I'd say that's probably both an opportunity and a challenge - the pace at which things are moving. But it's an exciting challenge too, just to get to be a part of this next evolution of marketing and really just the corporate world and what's possible with some of these new technologies.

I'd say authenticity. I always want to be authentically myself. I'm not going to try to pretend to be someone else to climb the ladder, or in my personal life to get something that I want. I always want to make sure that I'm achieving whatever, whether that is professionally or personally, by being authentically myself.