Starting in the storm
I started at Hifly in 2020, still a university student, right in the middle of COVID. Everything was online, everything was new, and on top of that I was also trying to keep a 100-person student organization alive as its president—except "keeping it alive" meant doing it entirely through a screen, locked in my room like everyone else.
There was no office to walk into, no one to shadow in person, no hallway conversations to pick things up from. So from day one, having someone dedicated to walking me through it mattered more than it normally would have.
Learning the ropes
My first mentor, Balázs, was the one who helped me take my first steps in the consulting market: from the small and practical to the genuinely complex.
On one end, something as simple as how to take good notes in a client meeting—which sounds trivial until you realize how much actually depends on it. On the other end, things like the ins and outs of running a C-level executive interview, or how to build a full framework from absolutely nothing. Both ends mattered equally.
But maybe more important than any single skill was the career guidance. Which directions were worth trying, what to explore, how to actually figure out what I enjoyed working on rather than just what I was assigned. That kind of support is harder to name, but it's the kind that shapes where you end up.
A mentor change, right on time
The mentor switch to Marci landed almost exactly when I was becoming a medior consultant, and at the time, it felt like losing something—Balázs had been there from the very start, after all. But in hindsight, the timing worked out. Becoming senior calls for a different kind of support than becoming mid-level does, and a new mentor came with exactly that.
Two years have passed since then. Under Marci's mentoring, I took on project lead responsibility for a number of projects, big and small. In 2025, I stepped into the mentor role myself, guiding an intern. And in 2026, I was officially promoted to senior.
My relationship with Marci today leans more toward friendship than formal mentoring. There's simply less need for hands-on professional support—solving tasks, walking through frameworks—but that gap has been filled by something else: softer topics like work-life balance have become the things we actually talk about now.
What actually changed
A few moments stand out when I think about what really moved the needle:
My first time interviewing a client, which I kept refining until I could run C-level workshops entirely on my own.
My first time leading a project, with all the administrative and professional tricks that come with it.
The first time someone I mentored stepped out and presented on their own.
And underneath all of it, a long list of soft-skill best practices: time management, communication, and learning to think both adaptively and holistically instead of just task by task.
None of these happened in a single moment. They were built the same way everything else was—by doing it, getting it wrong, and doing it slightly better the next time.
Be the next you
You don't need a perfect starting point—I certainly didn't have one. What you need is someone willing to walk you through the first steps, and eventually, the willingness to become that person for someone else.
Join us here: https://www.hiflylabs.com/careers
