Olga Kirillova

I started at adidas Russia in 2006 as a personal assistant. Fourteen years later I was running product at adidas Originals and running a team at Wayfair.

In between, I got to do a lot. Run €20 million in marketing budgets across 800 adidas stores. Plan brand events for 7,000 people. Manage a $50 million product catalogue across 17 European countries.

Most of my reviews said "exceeds expectations." But all that success at the office didn't show up where it mattered. Carsten and I wanted a second child but couldn't get pregnant for two years because we were burned out and anxious. We got sick on every holiday, every Christmas.

So I quit. Spent my savings on coach training. Started over in work I could be present for.

Pandemic. Two kids at home. No website. No email list. 400 Instagram followers. We grew to €6K a month in 15 months. Better than nothing, never quite stable.

That first year taught us something painful. Being a great expert isn't enough when you work for yourself. What matters is how well you can market and sell what you know. We'd spent €40K on more certifications and random courses trying to become better coaches. We should have been investing in marketing and sales systems instead.

So we pivoted. Back to what we'd been doing at adidas and Wayfair for years: marketing and sales. We went deep into both. Then we started packaging what we learned for senior experts who'd left corporate. That became mettaCofounder. A second company came later for sales teams at growing tech companies. That's mettaScale. And the engineering team we built along the way became mettaEngineer.

Across our companies. Same work I did at adidas: find out what people need, build it, refine it. Just for different kinds of buyers now, with AI doing the heavy lifting on outreach.

In every conversation I lean on 200+ client engagements, a nose for when someone's telling themselves a story, and the ability to say something hard, kindly.