About Mario – Business Advisor & Executive

My name is Mario Peshev and I’m a serial entrepreneur, business advisor, angel investor, and columnist for Entrepreneur and Forbes.

Over the course of my career, I’ve been featured and quoted hundreds of times and have led over 150 training courses and workshops.

In 2019, I authored “126 Steps to Becoming an Entrepreneur” (available on Amazon), with stories and chapters featured in 20+ universities in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Bloomberg interview on business and ecommerce

Some of my current endeavors:

  • CEO of DevriX – a team of 50 and one of the top 20 WordPress consultancies that pioneered “WordPress retainers.” We work with SMEs scaling martech solutions through experimentation, data, and marketing ops solutions on top of WordPress. My agency scaled 10 billion monthly views and over $400M in goods sold over the past year.
  • CEO of Rush – the first Shopify order tracking app “Built for Shopify”, powering 2,800 stores by improving customer satisfaction through shipment tracking and notifications across 1,300+ carriers, estimated date of delivery for store owners, and powerful upsells on the tracking page and via email and SMS notifications with partners like Klaviyo and SMSBump.
  • Business Advisor at Growth Shuttle – having consulted over 400 companies on management and business strategy, operations, marketing funnels and digital transformation, outsourcing, automation.
  • Angel investor and ambassador at SeedBlink – the leading European investing network. Half of my investments are through the network and individual investments in several progressive companies (current list of investments)
  • Ambassador at Flippa – the largest digital acquisition marketplace. I’ve facilitated 6 and 7-figure deals through the market and made 40+ transactions as an individual buyer.

I run and advise smaller operations as well thanks to applying my own playbooks across my companies, running efficient processes and content initiatives with experienced managers and trained executive assistants.

My Advisory Background

My foray into business advisory starts with technology. Building my first website in 1999, learning the ropes from media and tech consultancies, taking on business analyst contracts, pivoting into freelancing, and growing my first agency.

This further branched into consulting gigs and public speaking, bootstrapping a separate startup (and further, several other companies), taking on more private clients, and organizing group training courses for organizations like SAP, VMware, CERN, Saudi Aramco, and more.

While running my consulting practice and my agency, I devoted 15 years to management masterminds, polishing my skills during thousands of interviews, validating marketing techniques (and successfully ranking for the most competitive keywords online), and a focused effort on developing robust business strategies.

I also wrote an entrepreneurship book (book signing in LA and SF with some Q&As after):

entrepreneurship workshop and book signing in San Francisco

Since then, I’ve worked with over 400 companies as a business advisor and consultant in scaling small startups to 7 figures, growing 6-figure businesses to some generating $20M+ nowadays, and handling high-level initiatives for large enterprises.

Mario Peshev

Monthly coaching calls and blueprints for businesses

Business Advisors 101

To streamline the conversation, I’ve authored hundreds of training resources – here and in reputable journals like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, discussing different stages of the process at length.

Here are some of the relevant pieces on what business advisory represents and how to leverage the suite of skills when working with an advisor:

Transitioning From Digital Consulting

Mario Peshev teaching a digital consultancy workshop
Leading a digital workshop

For over a decade, most of my new business advisor contracts have focused on tech, digital transformations, marketing strategies, and WordPress integration for enterprises. Due to demand (and our partners scaling over the years), corporate business advisors like myself are solving many problems around recruitment, managing technical teams, handling operations, running successful agencies, building distributed teams, and employer branding (to name a few).

I’ve worked with massive tech companies on training courses, banks on financial software solutions, telecoms on delivery platforms, companies in the automotive and aviation industries, digital agencies, and over two hundred mid-sized enterprises in numerous niches as a corporate business consultant. 

Most of my regular business advisory clients are agencies within the $1M – $20M revenue mark looking for company advisors to help scale their operations, automate processes, grow their digital presence, bootstrap their content work, and hire better talent. 

Mario was perfect for me because he experienced exactly the same issues I’m facing right now and I look forward to speaking with him again as I implement his advice!

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Andrea Di Rocco

Founder at SOS-WP.it & Dating.Coach

What Does a Business Advisor Do?

Since most of my work has revolved around digital consultancy, I wrote a detailed guide on how digital consultants bring value to SMEs.

Some of the key areas digital consulting provides are:

  • Integration of digital tools and solutions for better insights enabling data-driven planning
  • Establishing a strategy for successful growth online (through organic, social, email, direct, and referral traffic)
  • Determining the right technology stack for boosting digital presence (including landing page development, lead opt-ins, digital funnels)
  • Review and implementation of digital and content strategies
  • Working on actionable channels for partnership development and nurturing and PR opportunities
  • Short-term and long-term strategy development and execution

Working as a business advisor, I’m in charge of additional activities around operations, recruitment, management, and strategy (because defining processes and scaling teams are paramount for success).

Some of the leading problems businesses struggle with could be discovered in my long-form analysis of 38 common business challenges (taught at several universities in North America).

Mario is professional, super responsive and provided immediate expert guidance and answers in half the scheduled time! Highly recommended.

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Iva Koberg

Founder – Winds+Water

Problems I’ve been consulting on aside from digital are:

  • Designing a robust and scalable recruitment strategy
  • Employer branding
  • Managing a growing team
  • Scaling operations with remote talent
  • Optimizing, designing, and following progress for internal workflows and processes
  • Defining KPIs and monitoring results monthly and quarterly
  • Refining the digital strategy with all parties involved: staff, partners, vendors, customers
  • Establishing new monetization channels with growth strategy in mind
  • Evaluating manual labor that could be automated and optimized

Aren’t There Too Many Coaches/Consultants/Advisors?

“Step Into Success Now” created a practical breakdown of the coaching industry across the broad population.

Note: a good percentage of the coaches and consultants out there focus on life coaching or productivity/training which is applicable to each and every individual (not limited to organizations).

So even if 1 percent of the world’s population is looking for a coach, that represents about 76 million people.

With about 200,000 coaches and consultants out there, the average a consultant is expected to handle is approximately 380 clients.

While most consulting and advisory engagements require several hours a month (up to 15-30 hours monthly), even at a rate of an hour per customer, 380 hours a month would be more than double the actual billing capacity of the coach. Let alone the fact that every consultant spends additional time on reviewing emails, presales calls, pro bono work (like content marketing or presenting at schools) which limits their potential even further.

And so many coaches work a day job that develops their skills and enables them to be effective as corporate business advisors.

In conclusion, the consulting industry will keep evolving. Finding the right business advisor with a suitable background and overlapping goals and vision will become easier, leading to more businesses taking advantage of the opportunity.

Mario went above and beyond our expectations in answering our questions on the call and even answering a few short follow-up questions via private message. Highly recommended!

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Steve Black

Founder, Techboomers

Why Hire a Business Advisor?

A common question I hear at events is:

“Why should I hire a business advisor hourly instead of finding a full-time member in-house?”

Veteran business advisors are not available for full-time employment.

They manage their own businesses and test out strategies firsthand.

Managing leadership teams and building culture daily
My local DevriX team meeting Cal Evans for a workshop

Working with a business advisor, you:

  1. Pay for a couple of hours a month, not 160
  2. Don’t cover vacation, sick leaves, 401k
  3. Invest in strategic advice tailored to your business problems and needs
  4. Tap into over a decade of business experience (in some cases 20+ years)
  5. Utilize practical strategy tested with dozens or hundreds of other businesses
  6. Get access to industry data that requires a portfolio of businesses, not a single company
  7. Receive introductions and warm contacts to media, conference attendees, etc.
  8. Win free exposure from the advisor’s digital presence (which is a given)

Basically, you’re paying for the expertise, data-driven solutions tested with many other businesses, connections, PR, media exposure, partner contacts, discounts, opportunities to automate and scale your ROI. It’s in no way comparable to hiring a single person in-house.

I’ve attended (alone) consulting meetings with 11 stakeholders in a company meeting me for different problems, from marketing and sales through design, database work, technology, business growth, automation, management, delegation, and more.

(In fact, that’s a little-known fact, companies can bring several teammates together to a meeting).

Discussing marketing and commerce trends

How to Find The Right Business Advisor

Finding the right consultant or advisor for your business could be a chore. Different company advisors focus on different areas depending on their background and interests.

In essence, validate the consultant’s credibility, follow them for a while, see if you resonate with their vision and whether the would be a good fit for you.

If in doubt, reach out and ask.

Or schedule a one-off consulting call to dip your finger in the water.

Clarity is an open network of industry experts in an area you need help with (I’ve used it both as an advisor AND as a client). Here’s what one of my consulting clients said:

Quite a good call. Mario bracketed the issues really quickly and then gave me project suggestions that I could understand. I’m not saying I’m slow, but Mario just has a clear way of expressing things, to the point where I’m going to be able to plug things right into my project. I’m finding that Clarity is becoming a kind of board of directors that helps me make smarter decisions *before* I spend money, instead of after.

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Paul MacMartin

Technical Writer, 25+ Years of Experience

Need Help?

The easiest way to connect for a long-term business advisory program is by scheduling a Clarity call first. We can spend 15min discussing your strategic problems and ensuring we can align your strategy in at least one area you can execute immediately.

Helping out engineering students in entrepreneurship
Teaching a career workshop for tech students in software engineering

It’s crucial to me that we’re on the same page and my goals will resonate with you, too. Lack of execution is what leads to the stigma around the coaching and consulting industry. Think of free ebooks: how many times you downloaded one, never read the whole book, and left with a bitter taste (or no feedback at all)?

This is why advisory is a pay-to-play game. Your own investment serves as an integral commitment for you to your own business and its growth.

I’ll let you in on a secret in the field.

Business consultants rarely reinvent the wheel.

You’ll rarely hear something you can’t come up with yourself. Except for some connections or extra exposure or tools you can use.

The whole idea of business advisory is to limit the number of opportunities in your head (which oftentimes exceed a hundred different paths to take) to 2 or 3 options you can focus on.

Focus, planning, and execution are the three core pillars. Experienced business advisors design a strategy or two for you, plan the execution process, help you allocate resources, and assist with making this happen.

The goal is to answer: What you should focus on now and align your resources in the right direction.

And if you want to explore the way I roll as an advisor, here are several resources you can use (and accounts to follow) to get some practical insights over the coming weeks:

And if you want to scale at your own pace, there are three community plans ranging from $99/mo to $1,800/mo in my Community.

Working with a business advisor is a long-term game. Make sure you do your due diligence and touch base when you’re ready to scale your business.