Our Team

Rachel Victoria Webb
Chief Operating Officer

Rachel has 15 years of experience in management consulting, financial analysis, marketing and brand management. After attending Howard University’s MBA program, she committed her career to building her expertise in minority/women-owned business consulting in the entertainment, real estate, and services industries. In this vein, Rachel has supported businesses in developing go-to market strategies, instituting cost containment measures, establishing stronger financial records, navigating revenue and profitability growth and building company cultures rooted in mindfulness and self-development. As Hire Ground’s COO, Rachel brings her execution mind-set and bias toward action, focusing on the operational details and growth challenges necessary for success today.

“The culture of a company is a reflection of that organization’s identity. A healthy culture can augment growth, and it can be the glue that holds an organization together during structural shifts. But to build a truly synergistic team there has to be a clear and common understanding of your business, your customer, and your purpose. Strategies must be measured and thoughtful to keep the business connected to who they are and who they aspire to be. In that way, culture and scale are inextricably linked.”

– On the importance of culture when scaling your business

Marty Parker
Chief Strategy Officer

Marty brings over 25 years of executive experience and a proven track record of growing sales and cutting costs while improving business performance. His speciality areas include supply chain, manufacturing and operations improvement; testing and improving new business and manufacturing processes; and product development, marketing, and international expansion. As a lecturer teaching Operations Management and Quality Management at the University of Georgia (UGA), Marty facilitates the career development success of his students and is currently organizing a Supply Chain Advisory Board for UGA. As Hire Ground’s Chief Strategy Officer, Marty leads the company’s strategic-planning processes, forges new strategic relationships externally, creates synergies across the organization, and creates greater transparency and accountability for those people carrying out the company’s strategy.

“Many firms are very difficult to work with, including layers of bureaucracy and multiple (often conflicting) requirements that exclude many suppliers – streamlining the processes for new (and often better) suppliers is critical for success. Ultimately, strong suppliers are integrally tied to the success of the firm and must be encouraged and included in the conversation about what matters to customers. This helps leverage the financial advantage that comes from diverse suppliers – as well as match new customer expectations around diversity and inclusion.”

– On best practices for supplier inclusion professionals

Keith Heffron
Chief Financial Officer

Keith is an innovative financial leader, business owner, and transformative CFO who specializes in maximizing revenue and valuation, capital management and scaling emerging companies. His areas of expertise include strategic leadership, financial planning, internal audit, and leadership development. Keith’s distinguished career includes specific focus on pricing strategies as well as revenue assurance, reducing bad debt, treasury, controlling designing and implementing risk management strategies. At Hire Ground, Keith looks across multiple horizons and creates a well-integrated financial roadmap creating a clear path to growth while driving measurable value to our long-term objectives.

“Financial Roadmaps aren’t just about dollars and cents. They lay out a plan to allocate scarce resources in a way that ensures company success, and provide an early warning system when adjustments need to be made. They ensure that a business stays on course in an ever-changing environment. Think of your financial roadmap as Waze for your business!”

– On the power of creating financial roadmaps

Fred Kalombo
VP of Engineering

Prior to joining Hire Ground, Fred led the GHX-Vendormate product development team from its inception to several acquisitions. Fred helped scale Vendormate’s hospital supplier credentialing for over 6,000 hospitals and architected its enterprise mobile strategy for increased access and scalability. Fred’s experience includes streamlining the feature deployment pipeline so developers can work productively, ensure security of the application, and provide scalable and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. At Hire Ground, Fred leads the architecture and engineering vision. Focusing on all aspects of the development lifecycle through best practices with a strong focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery to increase customer satisfaction.

“I believe that most people are capable of managing themselves when provided the right tools to get the job done. In fast-paced environments where continuous development and delivery is required, focusing on what works for each team member is important to promote ownership and increase trust to get the best out of your team.”

– On scaling high-performing engineering teams

Abhijit Ranade
Technical Delivery Manager

With more than 13 years of experience in Software Product and Project Management for Enterprise applications, Abhijit has worked across several verticals, including healthcare, insurance, and credentialing. He is a certified Product Owner and Scrum Master with core competencies in business analysis, delivery management, and software quality assurance. Abhijit has worked with major enterprises such as State Farm Insurance, Cigna Healthcare and GHX-Vendormate. At Hire Ground, Abhijit is the bridge between the product team and engineering team with a focus on data compliance, security & site integrity and quality assurance.

“Quality assurance practices when implemented at every stage of product development not only ensure that products are built as per customer requirements but also help in identifying and resolving potential risks at an early stage. In a fast-paced product development environment for a startup in the early stages where data security is paramount, a robust testing framework ensures high-quality product deliverables with minimum turnaround time for delivery. Testing proves indispensable in gaining customer trust by helping in building secure trustworthy products.”

– On why testing and data security is so important when building trust

Sachin Mahajan
Technical Lead

Sachin is a technical lead with more than ten years of experience in backend development. His areas of expertise in Dot Net, Dot Net Core and Laravel (PHP framework) technologies. He is expertise in cloud services like AWS cloud hosting, AWS services, Azure services, CI/CD pipelines. Sachin has applied his skills in a variety of domains including education, supply chain management, and healthcare. At Hire Ground, his role is to provide architectural blueprint and technical leadership to our IT team. Design, develop and execute software solutions to address business issues. He is responsible for managing the engineering team, and handling the deployments activities.

“In an advanced technological world, Engineers must be creative, capable as well as ready to handle the constantly changing world. We need high potential engineers to bring ideas into reality. The majority of today’s services and products have huge involvement of potential engineers that’s impacted people’s lives for the better. By applying the principles of mathematics and science, engineers develop solutions to the world’s biggest technical issues.”

– On hiring high-potential engineers

Stacey Cochran
Sales

Stacey brings over 20 years of technology sales and leadership experience to Hire Ground. He has a successful history of closing global multi-million dollar sales for enterprise and strategic customers across several verticals, including healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing. Stacey’s ability to use long-term vision to guide short-term decision-making, tactical planning, and staff development has been invaluable to Hire Ground as he builds and leads the company’s enterprise sales team.

“When looking to sell into Enterprise Customers, the number one key is to have all of your ducks in a row.  Understand that they will want to see things like financials, insurance, planning. They will understand you are a small company but will look to see that you can be a strong partner. They want you to be successful as well.”

– On advice to Hire Ground’s suppliers and other small business on how to sell into enterprise companies

Patrick Seguin
Communications

Patrick brings over 20 years of writing and content management experience to Hire Ground. One of Europe’s most sought-after writers, his articles and videos have been published on renowned news portals and blogs including The Verge and Hackernoon. He has previously managed content marketing and communication teams for O2 and AVG (now Avast). As Hire Ground’s Communications Director, ensuring the company’s messaging is consistent and effective across all channels. Patrick leads all things “content”, directing what we say as an organization, who we say it to, and, most importantly, how we say it with the goal of keeping all stockholders informed about business decisions.

“Every day we consume a flood of content through a variety of channels, whether we want to or not. As we dive into this torrent of words, images, and video, each piece of content has a tiny window of opportunity to capture our attention. Concise, clear, and engaging communication opens that window wide as it ensures audiences understand your messages and helps your content achieve its goals.”

– On the importance of communication 

Liliia Chorna
Art Director

Liliia is a graduate of the School of Visual Communication, KNLU Oriental Studies. She gained over a decade of design and illustration experience serving local and global clients while working for leading advertising agencies, including the McCann Group and the Mullen Lowe Group. Liliia has created award-winning work for internationally renowned brands, including Kimberly-Clark, Coca-Cola, The Carlsberg Group, and Nestlé. As Hire Ground’s Art Director, Liliia is ensuring the company’s design is consistent with the Hire Ground brand across all channels.

“In a dynamic startup environment, visual consistency becomes a somewhat challenging yet exciting goal. The target audience is just starting to recognize the brand so sticking to the visual identity becomes crucial. At the same time quickly changing scope, brand presence on various platforms and new objectives require adaptivity and variability. Basically, it means that we need to be flexible and persistent at the same time.”

– On visual consistency in a startup environment

Kseniya Kramarenko
Product Owner

Kseniya spent three years working closely with startups from all over the world. With a diverse academic background that combines Informatics, International Business, and Finance, she is well prepared to apply methodology from more than one field to make business decisions based on a multi-sided analysis approach. Kseniya’s superpower is coordinating geographically dispersed multicultural teams to make sure that the right product is shipped at the right time which is possible only when everyone in a team is going in the same direction. At Hire Ground, Kseniya is defining product requirements and the desired user experience for customers.

“While bringing a new product to market, you can feel that your opportunities are endless and your creativity is unlimited. But you need to focus on product-market fit and always keep in mind, the users, whose problem you solve. By focusing on your target user, you will be able to build a product that your audience will love.”

– On the joys of bringing a product to market

Kali Kucera
Customer Success

Kali built his career at Microsoft, where his endeavors and accomplishments ranged from engineering online help systems (including the highly-regarded SQL Server Books Online), architecting and managing operational support systems for technical writers and editors, and leading company efforts to promote the research and development of AI-powered answer-bots. He is passionately interested in “social help”, where great content and great people come together in a rapid time frame. At Hire Ground, Kali is responsible for building a strong customer success culture.