Sabrina Prioletta (Commerce, 1997) was able to launch her own marketing consulting firm a decade ago and has worked with major clients including Bombardier, CN, and Microsoft, to name a few.
So how did she do it? In her view, Prioletta’s family instilled in her a drive to succeed from an early age.
“Both my parents were teachers, so there was a lot of pressure on me to perform from when I was a child,” she said.
Throughout her career, Prioletta has pushed herself to achieve and her hard work has paid off.
“For me, growth was essential. I could not stagnate at any role, so I was very much driven to acquire new skills. I wanted to continue climbing the corporate ladder.”
Prioletta said she knew early that her interests lay in marketing.
She attended a small high school in Montreal’s East End and said she chose Champlain College Saint-Lambert because she “felt right at home.”
“This was a place where I felt immediately comfortable,” she said.
After Cegep, Prioletta completed a Bachelor’s in marketing at Concordia University and was able to land her first industry job thanks to a successful co-op placement she completed during her studies.
In 2004, Prioletta landed a job as a brand manager working for Coty, where she worked with major global brands like Adidas and Rimmel.
After six years at Coty learning to manage Canadian portfolios, she took a role as a Brand Manager at Molson Coors Canada.
She said her experience working with global and national brands helped her develop the crucial skills she needed to take on new leadership roles.
“You gain so much insight. It’s a very enriching experience,” she said.
In 2011, Prioletta became the Marketing Director for The Montreal Gazette. She said it was a particularly challenging time to work in media marketing due to evolving readership profiles and the rapidly changing needs of the media industry.
“I was a little bit disenchanted,” she said. “Media was a very different beast from what I had done before.”
Prioletta was mandated to breathe new life into the brand despite the significant challenges within the industry. She said it was at this point that she started to think about striking out on her own.
She started taking entrepreneurship courses and learning what it would take to launch her own business and in 2012, SIVA Marketing was born.
Now, 10 years later, Prioletta has established her own successful brand.
“The more you put in, the more you get out of the business,” she said. “I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished over the years.”
Prioletta’s advice for current students and recent grads: “We all know intuitively what is right for us. If we just stop and be quiet and reflect, we know what we’re passionate about. We all gravitate toward certain things. Get back to what you’ve always loved to do as a child and that’s probably what will fulfill you in the future.”
