Giving Small Businesses Easier Access to Capital

Giving Small Businesses Easier Access to Capital

Sasha Yablonovsky is an immigrant, a mother, a wife, and a businesswoman. Currently she is a co-CEO and co-founder of Loanspark. Most recently she served as the President of CareerBuilder. She is a seasoned executive known for her ability to build high-performance teams that champion the voice of the customer inside organizations, and drive desired outcomes for a wide variety of clients. Sasha is motivated by helping companies grow, creating opportunities from within, and improving the culture of employees; as well as serving clients in the way that improves their overall lives from processes and products she is able to implement. Sasha’s accomplishments include building out a strategic plan and process to recover lost moneys for the largest Ponzi scheme in history, serving as the voice for working mothers and professional women as a public speaker, and growing her career from project manager to CEO in just under a decade. Outside of work, Sasha likes to travel with her husband and two sons, eat out, read fiction, watch Lifetime Movie Network, and spoil her boxer dog Gia.
Tell us your best small idea for big business wins
Engaging your customers and leads on a personal level – know their birthdays, anniversaries, kids names, spouses hobbies. It’s old school method of connecting, using new school tools. But it makes you and your company stand out.
Tell us about you; your background; brag about yourself!
I come from very humble beginnings as an immigrant. I have been working since I was 13 – nanny, answering phones, telemarketing. After a physically debilitating car accident as a freshman at Northeastern University, I went to work instead of returning to school right away. I was an office manager making $25,000/year, ten years later I was managing e-discovery strategy for the Madoff investigation making six figures, and ten years after that I was a President at CareerBuilder running a $500M company. I am a firm believer in “yes” and learning. As long as you are learning where you work, keep learning. As soon as you have soaked it all up, go learn elsewhere. No one is born a CEO or Founder or a project manager – we all had to say “yes” to try it and get there. Say “yes”, it will open many doors.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Right now the biggest challenge is trust. There are many companies doing the same things and pitching to the same customer – how do you/the customer trust it’s not just marketing? There are many theories about the pending recession – how do you trust how bad and how long? Social media sells lies every day – how do you trust the people you meet or work with? I think a lot of it is trust – know how to hire the right team, pick the right vendor/partner? Biggest opportunity for growth and overcoming obstacles is trusting your gut, learning who to trust, and figuring out how to trust.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
To be a visionary! I’m excellent at building strategy, executing, building strong culture in a workplace, but to be able to wake up and say “here is what we will need” or “here is what will be huge” in 20 years – that kind of visionary, big audacious dreams and visions. I’d build more companies, create more jobs, make more dreams come true.
What does “success” in 2023 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Success this year means growing Loanspark, and continuing to make its / our mission a reality on a larger scale. Success is also getting all 4 of us to agree on a vacation – my husband and I have 2 boys, one is in college and one is in elementary school – very different preferences.