About
Carolina

I was born in Venezuela. My mom is Cuban. She was an engineer, which gave me the early imprint that women could have nontraditional careers. My dad is Peruvian and Colombian. The summer after sixth grade, my family emigrated to Miami, and I lived there until I left for college.

I am the least musically talented member of my family.

My grandparents were Cuban exiles. They left Cuba at 37 and 40 with three children and nothing else, and they were my model for hard work, discipline, and perseverance. They thought traveling the world would be impossible from where they landed. They went on to do it anyway. They taught me to love travel, and somehow every job I've had since has required it. (The trail is on my LinkedIn.)

My grandparents also paid for my education at Georgia Tech, where I earned a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering.

Motorola

I started as a mechanical designer in Chicago in 1998, then joined Motorola as a process engineer. I led large-scale facility moves and line reconfigurations, designed accessible systems for disabled workers, and fell in love with structured problem solving. The leadership team, my boss and coworkers at Motorola provided unforgettable training in authenticity, professionalism, sharing the spotlight, and continuous improvement.

Into the Field: Nichiha

In 2008, recently divorced, I pivoted into the building materials industry.

At Nichiha, I shifted the installer training program from a two-day curriculum into a six-hour, scalable field training. I grew the technical department into a field support and design-assist structure that worked hand-in-hand with sales teams. We navigated product certifications through ICC, Miami-Dade, the Florida Building Code, CCMC, TDI, WUI, and other regulatory bodies. We collaborated with engineers, architects, and a manufacturing partner to develop new trim solutions, localized coating processes, designed a clip that won an architectural award, and launched a train-the-trainer model that empowered dealer reps to deliver technical training themselves.

This is where I started to see what most product companies miss: a great product is only half the work. The other half is the system that gets it specified, installed, and reordered. The hands-on side. The field side.

The Leap

By 2017, reality hit. Technical management wasn't going to fund three college educations. So I took the scariest leap of my life: out of technical work and into sales. The new role moved me from Atlanta to Los Angeles with three kids and no network.

I got a drink-from-the-firehose sales immersion from people I still feel lucky to have learned from: Mark Mitchell, Zach Williams of Venveo, and the great mentors I worked with at Nichiha. I started out chasing specs like everyone else. Eventually, through a lot of trial and error, I learned to lean into what I already had: technical knowledge and ten years of visiting job sites and troubleshooting on the spot.

When you lean into who you actually are, life gets so much easier.

Once I figured out how the channel ran, and the entire specification journey along with all of its players, I devised a system. It helped me become the top commercial rep in my company in under 18 months, in a brand new city, with a product line I had never worked with (tile and brick).

It paid off especially well during COVID, when the job site was the only place you could see anyone in person. I doubled down. I still talk about that in my Project Fluent training and workshops.

The result: $211K/month in sales, a $6.4M pipeline, and a system that kept producing after I left.

That was the birth of Project Fluent™, a simple, disciplined, teachable field-first sales system.

VP and the Turnaround

In 2021, I stepped into an executive role leading a struggling rainscreen business unit at a global manufacturer. I applied the same field systems with a profit-first lens.

Three years later: