Wonolo
Let’s meet Marcus!
Hello there, my name is Marcus Christopher Lee Tetwiler. At Wonolo, I am an enterprise account director on the sales team and I live in Santa Monica, California.
What events in your life have brought you to your current role today?
This will be a little bit of a longer answer, but I’m going to try to be brief. Thank you people team for asking a really good question. Firstly, what comes to mind is F.O.E., which stands for Family Over Everything. I have benefited from my family, the environment, my friends, and the people in my life that I’ve been so blessed to grow up around. I wouldn’t be here without that network, especially my family.
It really comes down to two themes for me, conviction and execution. I’ve learned over my time that strategy or having the idea is a commodity and that execution is the art. Execution, as an artist, is something that I learned at university when I was elected to be the student body president, presiding over 26,000 students across the entire university. We had a proper budget. We had a team of 10 people that were on payroll. We had a full-time number of staff positions across the university. It was a proper $26 million P & L budget that I was the sole proprietor of ultimately in my role. We assisted in providing legal and LGBTQ+ services to students. I learned how to sell an idea in three parts. 1) Communicating a clear before and after story. 2) Communicating a “Well, how do we get there?” plan. 3) Then ultimately being responsible for managing and executing, to deliver the results that were sold.
Those building blocks were important and they also taught about my capacity as a person. It was very busy and intense. There were trips to D.C. and across the country, all while also being a student. It was a lot, but it taught me what I could do and what I could contribute at a high level.
Stepping into the sales world. I continued to open and look to service. There’s life outside of work that fuels performance. One example that stands out to me was when I was at Story Box learning and getting beat over the head with the challenges of an early sales career. I want to shout out my first CEO, Justin Nasseri. He’s a former commander from the Navy who served on nuclear submarines and he taught me a lot about accountability, goal setting, execution, how to deliver the results, and what it means to roll up my sleeves to just get it done. While we were working hard and learning day in and day out, I stepped outside of my career bubble and was able to sign up and give a blind match with a patient who had leukemia. I was able to do a bone marrow transfusion and I remember coming into the office at 6/6:30 am getting the shots in the arm, preparing my body for a bone marrow transfusion all while in between those shots, working and hitting my goals. I was able to work on my career and have that service element that is so important to me in my life. The patient who was a blind match, who I’ve never met, received my bone marrow and as a Texan, I’m happy to say that this individual now enjoys EDM music and probably votes democrat if my DNA has anything to do with it. 🙂
I’ve been with Wonolo for a number of years. There’s a lot of Wonolo stories related to where I am today. I love the more complex, interesting, and challenging elements of our business. Our CEO, Yong Kim, identified my curiosity in me early on as he assigned me to a project for the Coca-Cola Company within just my first six months of being with Wonolo. Coca-Cola is still an important strategic partner of Wonolo’s today. Little things along the way where I’ve stepped outside of my comfort zone and delivered, have helped me mentally get where I’m at today.
Who do you look up to and why do you look up to them?
I look up to Yong Kim, Lori Macias, and Kevin Ori. My leaders are the type of people that you would roll your sleeves and go to battle with. As someone who aspires to leadership, there’s been so much that I’ve learned from the leaders that are ahead of me. It’s been an incredible ride. These three are the reason that I am where I am at Wonolo today. I will always be loyal and appreciative to them for their help throughout the years. I consider them family, and blood means a lot. These three are real ones. No matter where the future holds and what comes next, I will be so excited to see where they go and what they do. It’s been really amazing working with them for the last five years.
What is one of your favorite memories at Wonolo?
That’s a loaded question. There are so many, it’s been great working here. There’s been a lot of fun and work. We’ve been through a lot of offices. Now we don’t have an office, which is great.
There’s a lot of stories to share, but one quick one, without sharing names, came to mind. I remember being a part of the hiring committee for a very important candidate. During that candidate’s onsite, my co-manager and I were busy multitasking. We had calls, meetings, we had things going on, and we were wearing lots of hats. This was before we had a recruiting team to help us stay on task.
We had an hour onsite coming up and were busy with the work we had. We asked each other, “Hey, do you have anything planned for this interview?”
Neither of us did, but we both had important customer calls to make. We thought of splitting the one-hour interview into two customer calls to give the opportunity to hear firsthand how the Wonolo pitch goes and to hear from the customers themselves. That was what we did and it worked! We actually went two for two in that interview and we signed both of those customers right there. The candidate I think was impressed! They went on to accept the job and that candidate is still with Wonolo today, playing in what I would consider our most mission-critical role.
Looking back on it, it’s one of my favorite memories. That could have gone terribly, but it worked out and it’s an amazing story I look back fondly on. The startup hustle can be a little disorganized and last minute, but it worked out.
If you really knew me, you would know that…
If you really knew me, you would know that the version of me that you see in the office or in zoom is just a small sliver of me.
Thanks to the Wonolo people team for creating this opportunity to speak and to share. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, someone gets some value out of this and if you like it, please follow the Wonolo company on Linkedin and Twitter. Stay tuned in and there’ll be more stories like this to come. Stay in touch. Thanks so much. Cheers!
