Lydia Buss

The best career advice I ever received came from my leader at my previous finance job, Matt Hughes. When I was leaving to take this new opportunity, he told me, 'Life is too short, just go do it.' That advice really resonated with me because he had experienced a lot of things in his own career, and he understood that sometimes you just have to take the leap. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment when I was making the terrifying decision to leave a job where I had planned to stay forever. His words gave me the courage to pursue this incredible opportunity to build something from scratch at Marathon Media, even though it meant leaving the comfort and security of a 13-year career.

Don't let age matter. I've told the women I've mentored this same thing. Very early in my career, somebody told me when I went out for a promotion that I was young, I would have another chance, I had a young family. Women hear that a lot, but don't let age define your place at the table. I was very young when I started at my previous company, it was my first job out of university, and by the time I was managing, I was managing people that were easily multiple times my age. We have a tendency to equate age with experience, and it's just not true. Know what you know, and completely get that out of your mind. Be fearless in your experience. No matter what age you are at, you do not need to just defer to people who are older than you. And on the flip side, don't defer to people who are younger than you either. That doesn't just mean that they happen to have it all. Bring it to the table and have the best idea win, not the freshest face or the most senior person.

I believe the biggest challenge is the way that businesses are currently structured. They are pre-structured in a way where we have things that we feel like we need to follow, and going outside of the box and creating a different kind of culture in your business takes a lot of courage. It takes people who really believe in it as much as you do. At Marathon Media, we very much do people over profit. Kind capitalism is what we are aiming towards. We are not going to make business decisions that increase our net profits but cost our people. Anytime we can raise a salary or add better benefits, even if there's less net profits because of it, that's exciting. That's something we can pay for by growing our business specifically. While the biggest challenge is fear of doing something different, the biggest opportunity is exactly the same thing. You can do something different. I'm coming in to create infrastructure in this business that is a blank slate, so why not make it what you want it? You know, have a different operating agreement, have a different way that your board functions. Our CEO is not looking to have the greatest number of votes as the owner and therefore gets to decide what happens. We require unanimous decision-making. There are things like that where you can create a different generation of business in whatever field you're in, where you actually have quality people who stay and have enormous success and great efficiency in all of those things, because they actually care about where they're working.

The values most important to me in both my work and personal life are people over profit, kind capitalism, the courage to challenge conventional structures, and a commitment to investing deeply in people and culture.