Tiki Bar with Sheena White | From fearless intern to founder: building careers through stretch and strategy

On this Tiki Bar, Kevin Davis sat down with Sheena White—founder and principal advisor at Beacon Velocity Group—to trace a career defined by stretch moves, clear-eyed self-assessment, and a deep bias for action. From selling jewelry at JCPenney at 16 to presenting to managing directors at Goldman Sachs, leading strategy at Amex, Citi, and PayPal, and now advising companies on partnerships and revenue, Sheena’s through-line is simple: be honest about what energizes you, learn fast, and keep looking up at the market.

Early signals: sales instincts, self-awareness, and the first career pivot

Sheena’s earliest paid work came with a glass case and a key: selling jewelry at JCPenney. She loved helping brides choose pieces, learning product details (weight, shape, feel), and turning repeat interactions into relationships. That same curiosity and people energy powered stints selling clothes and designer shoes—where she discovered commissions and the feedback loop of "just talk to people."

Even earlier, a choice not to attend the Philadelphia School of Performing Arts became a lesson in self-awareness. She realized she didn’t want to pursue music professionally—the passion needed to go all-in wasn’t there—and she carried that honesty forward.

In college, engineering looked like the right blend of problem-solving and practicality. A refinery coding internship showed her what didn’t fit: isolated heads-down dev work. She pivoted to mechanical engineering with a business minor—keeping the math and systems thinking, adding market context.

Goldman to Booth: exposure, training, and the audacity to be in the room

One meeting changed her trajectory. As the founder of her campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and a career coach on campus, Sheena landed in a session with Goldman Sachs recruitment leadership exploring engineering-school hiring. She sprinted to understand the business, applied to a closing internship, nailed a super day, and opened a door she hadn’t known existed.

At Goldman, exposure and training defined the experience. Presenting to MDs at 22 meant learning to own the room because she had done the work. Great managers were transparent, calm, and had her back—creating safety to be fearless: book meetings, ask the questions, take on more. That foundation of trust and preparation shaped her leadership lens.

The 2008 crash reframed next steps. Sheena wanted to build commercial strategy muscle fast and across problems. Booth’s analytical rigor and design-your-own-curriculum model gave her stretch in a new way, with people she clicked with. It set up the move into operating roles where culture, leadership, and problem quality mattered.

Why Amex (and why she rose quickly): culture, product-market fit, and real problems

Post-MBA, Sheena sought environments that built business acumen through varied, consequential problems—without committing to long-term consulting. Amex offered rotational strategy challenges inside a culture that grew leaders. The company’s clear product-market fit let teams obsess about getting better—data, execution, and learning—within healthy guardrails.

She credits acceleration to three things: loving problems she could explain at a family table, leaders who aligned on values and collaboration, and a culture that rewarded initiative. That combination turned curiosity and hunger into compounding impact.

Leading people: hire for values, design for trust, be intentional

The sales-floor people person became a leader who treats trust as the performance multiplier. Early advice she still uses: don’t hire replicas of yourself. Hire for smarts, work ethic, values alignment, and complementary gaps. Then be explicit—on delegation, standards, and how information lands—because clarity is the on-ramp to excellence.

The proof is alumni: most of her former direct reports still keep in touch. That’s the network you build when you invest the time and intentionality to help people show up as their best.

Strategy in fast-moving markets: keep looking up

Sheena’s default first step in any new role: understand how the company makes money and where it sits relative to the market. Competitor tracking isn’t obsession—it’s a signal for what customers are being taught to expect. Partnerships and BD roles hardwire this discipline; internally focused roles can lose it if you’re not careful.

She schedules small, consistent windows to scan: read, listen, attend when possible. A personal lesson powers the habit: after spending early-career time deep in data centers and telephony, she looked up post-business school and realized she’d missed the inflection of AWS and hyperscale cloud—an area her experience could have directly mapped to. The takeaway: value your past experiences and keep re-translating them into what’s emerging now.

Founding Beacon Velocity Group: learn to trust yourself, then build

Two years ago, Sheena started asking a sharper question: could she be an owner who "knows how to make a dollar"? A chance conversation abroad about residency via business formation sparked the realization—there was a barrier she could remove. Add to that a trend radar tuned by years in strategy, a surge of founder podcasts, and a desire for her sons to see entrepreneurship up close.

Beacon Velocity Group is a fractional advisory firm focused on strategic partnerships to drive revenue—helping businesses that sell through platforms, ecosystems, and partner networks. In other words, the work she’s done across large operators, now tailored to founders and teams that need leverage.

The surprising hard part wasn’t productizing her expertise—it was trusting that her perspective was enough to move clients farther, faster. She spent a year validating with conversations across founders, VCs, advisors, and operators. Now, the appeal is the range: BD one hour, offer design the next, then a deep dive with a founder on goals, financials, and the next critical inflection. Strategy meets execution, repeat. And the timing—amid rapid tech shifts—makes the learning curve even richer.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bH_RqRVTpY

Sheena closes each day grounded: a short dose of scripture or a sermon to reset what’s in her control—how she processes, shows up, and decides. Recently, she worked through Designing Your Life, this time with mid-career clarity. The point isn’t a retirement countdown; it’s owning what you love and what you don’t—and designing accordingly. That’s the arc of her story: be honest, seek stretch, keep looking up, and build the thing you want to see.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bH_RqRVTpY