Check Out Alora Chistiakoff’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alora Chistiakoff

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started off in the Northern California wine country, during the early days of the internet. My first career role — which was at a startup — set the stage for the next twenty-five years. I loved everything about what I found in that first job: the people, the pressure, the problem-solving, the creativity, the unknown. To this day, most of my best friends are still from that time and place in my life. I often refer to it as Boot Camp. It was a formative experience for me the way that many people are shaped by college or the military.

After five years (and several roles) at that first startup, I moved to New York City on my 30th birthday (literally). Over the course of the next twenty years, I’d live in Austin, Texas; Monterrey, Mexico; Medellin, Colombia; Miami, Florida; Grand Junction, Colorado; Santa Rosa, California (my home town); and ultimately land in Tucson, Arizona. During that time, I would work for myself, I’d work for publicly traded companies; I’d have C-level positions, and individual contributor roles. I also got married, divorced, married again and then widowed, while raising dogs, traveling the world and re-inventing myself a few different times.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like most of us, I have been alternatively lucky and unlucky at different points in time.

On one hand, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have met some incredible people who have been enormously influential at different points in my life — usually precisely when I needed them. Whether that was the right boss, the right mentor, the right business partner or the right employee, I am profoundly grateful for how an amazing tapestry of talented and generous people have influenced my life, often in ways that vastly exceeded anything anyone could have predicted.

On the other hand, I have watched my personal life and limitations almost always be the obstacle that I had to overcome — and somehow that surprised me more than it really should have. Whether it was my own patience for what working inside a particular company required, or whether it was needing to get my (second) husband life-saving medical treatment that required moving half way across the country. I mistakenly always viewed by life and my career as distinct aspects of my existence, and was never fully prepared for the extent to which they are genuinely inter-related.

At (almost) 50, what I see more clearly now than I ever previously have is that the second half of my life needs to look very different than the first half in nearly every way. I started my professional journey just assuming my personal life would take care of itself, and I made profoundly sloppy choices. Whether it was my starter marriage or my excessively casual (and at times, downright sloppy) relationship with money, whether it was neglecting to be deliberate about my physical health or not prioritizing the people in my life, I have come to recognize that I spent too much time, energy and talent on building other people’s businesses, and no where near enough on trying to build my own life.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have spent two and a half decades organizing teams to deliver complex technology solutions for customers. Whether that is in a Professional Services setting or in-house, my specialty is in managing the people and process of delivering complex tech, mostly in the retail and hospitality spaces.

The services business is complicated, because you are often a slave to two masters: customers and software partners (e.g. Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.). Software companies typically rely on professional services organizations to implement their products for customers, but that usually means working with them to co-sell into customers, and then successfully implement a customized version of their product to a customer who may or may not fully understand what they bought or what implementation is really going to require.

Working with large software companies can be very tricky. I’ve worked with many of them over the years, and the patterns are consistent: they expect partners to be grateful, they expect that partners can solve anything, and far too often, the sales teams that partners must work with are radically removed from the realities of the solutions they sell, and so are willing to promise most anything to a customer to close a deal without any accountability for making it happen. They can also get incredibly petty and punitive, and are almost never above threatening to cut off your pipeline if they are unhappy or if you even consider working with a competitor.

It is a business that for many years was a very stable industry, because it was quite literally a time-for-money function that always needed people (though, the price competition was largely based on offshoring talent in the most practical and efficient ways possible). At this point however, it is an industry that is undergoing massive disruption because of Generative AI. Everything about the business model will be re-written in coming years, and so it is in a state of unprecedented chaos.

I started off as a project manager handling client implementations, but over the years my roles have evolved to running the services practices — driving the pre-sales process, running the global delivery teams responsible for doing the work, breaking into new markets or new technologies, and — most significantly — either rapidly growing and scaling an organization because of a big influx of work, or recovering a disastrous situation that has spun out of control. My real specialty is in breaking down huge problems into actionable steps, communicating them effectively (to both teams and customers), and then leading global teams to execute effectively to accomplish the goal in front of us.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
“Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown has been a particularly influential book to me in recent years. I’ve shared it with most of my teams and coaching clients.

Most recently “From Strength to Strength” by Arthur C. Brooks has been especially resonant for me. He breaks down a few truly meaningful points that were legitimate epiphanies for me, not the least of which is that it’s not realistic to expect to remain good at what we used to be good at anymore than its reasonable to expect a star athlete to play his sport the same way at 50 as he did at 25. He also, very usefully, addresses accomplishment as what can only be described as a bottomless addiction that even the most successful people must, at some point, find a way to free themselves of. There is a lot of very useful insight in his book, especially for people at or near midlife.

Finally, less of a book than a tool, is the Gallup Strengths Assessment. I am a certified Gallup Strengths Coach, and I have found it to be one of the most useful tools, for both myself, my teams and my coaching clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.firebirdsummit.com/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alorachistiakoff3088/videos
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/3sbOznGxz8LHtcuiOct97l?si=719efd2b7613429c