Carlos López Velarde Ponce de León

I'm a business strategist based in León, Mexico, working remotely with international teams. My background sits at the intersection of strategy, operations, and finance, and most of my work has been about making sure the people making decisions have accurate information in front of them.

For four years I was Strategy & Operations Lead at OceanHero, a remote startup headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. I worked as the CEO's analytical right hand through the company's growth and eventual acquisition. I rebuilt our financial operations and reporting workflow, cutting month-end close by roughly six days and improving accuracy by 21%. I built impact reporting frameworks with verified metrics that partners and sponsors relied on, translated user insights into process improvements that lifted adoption by about 10%, and produced the analysis and presentations leadership used with investors. Before I left, I recruited and trained the team that took over my function so it kept running independently.

I studied Business Strategy & Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where I delivered 35+ company-sponsored consulting projects in five-week sprints for firms including Aeroméxico, Telcel, Capgemini, Grupo Modelo, and Xiaomi. The work covered market entry, profitability modeling, process redesign, and leadership strategy. I placed 4th internationally with an Estée Lauder market-entry strategy for Japan and was national runner-up in the TEC-Xiaomi case competition. I also spent an exchange semester at IÉSEG in Lille, France, where I built full financial statements from scratch and studied AI for Business.

More recently I founded Impossible Studio, a subscription-based creative studio, where I built the entire client operation from the ground up: pipeline, scoping, delivery timelines, pricing, and billing. I've since handed the day to day over to my team.

Toolkit: Tableau, Looker Studio, Excel, FP&A, and Agile/Scrum (Certified Scrum Master). I also work with AI tools daily for reporting and workflow automation, which I think is where a lot of manual operational effort is going to disappear over the next few years.

I work in English and Spanish at a native level, and I'm fully remote-first: comfortable with async communication, proactive updates, and flagging problems early. I'm open to roles across US, Canadian, European, and Mexican time zones.