Elena Juslin joins Columbia Road

Hi Elena, How did you get good at what you do?

I’ve always been interested in all sorts of things: business, economics and behavioural psychology to name a few. I figured out going to a business school would allow me to combine several of my interests – which made the choice of school easy but postponed the difficult decision to when I had to choose my major. I chose international business because it allowed me to combine two of my primary interests: marketing and leadership. Later on my curiosity in the technical aspect of marketing drove me to dive deeper into digital marketing in my internships and jobs.

Where have you earned your spurs?

The most consequential working experience for me has been working at Teamit, an IT-consulting company. My work consisted of a wide array of hands-on digital marketing activities from SEM to social media and email marketing – all of which had to be supported by rather comprehensive data analysis. I was given a lot of responsibility and learned more than I ever anticipated. Before Teamit I worked at the Finnish National Agency for Education where I did some social media marketing, but more importantly gained a steady understanding of data analysis, website building, different CMSs, international marketing and customer journeys.

Why Columbia Road?

I kept bumping into Columbia Road’s name everywhere: in digital marketing trainings where a Roadie was the coach, in discussions related to the digital business industry, and I even saw their poster in some restaurant’s toilet. I was pretty impressed, Columbia Road seemed like a very cool, fun and relaxed company, but most importantly, super proficient at what they did.

Columbia Road’s flat organisation structure is very unique, I love being able to talk to and ask for help from anyone. Even if the majority of consultants spend most of their time working at client premises, the company culture is warm and welcoming. I feel that the culture encourages people to care about each other as individuals and to have healthy working hours and routines. When projects are allocated people’s interests are taken into account, which in turn makes employees motivated and makes them love their job!

Lauri, what will make our clients love Elena?

“Elena is a professional with rigorous perseverance and endless curiosity. She is very goal focused, and excels at finding diverse solutions to problems until the desired result is attained. Her wide array of marketing technology skills and understanding in international marketing, combined with a highly analytical mindset makes her the kind of full stack marketer who will bring about the sought results for our clients,” says Lauri Eloranta, Managing Partner at Columbia Road.

What makes your heart beat a little faster?

"I tend to have phases of being really curious about something. Sometimes it’s reading about various things like unsolved crimes, politics or psychological experiments. Sometimes I’m very into digital art or learning coding. Other times it’s analysing data and playing around with Excel – yes, I do it for fun!" says Elena.