Who you actually get
Alex Benavides
Founder & Managing Partner, Column 13, leading its people-consulting practice.
Alex builds culture the way good engineers build systems. He walks into companies under pressure and leaves them with stronger leaders, tighter teams, and numbers that move.
He has spent close to twenty years on the unglamorous, high-stakes side of building companies: the managers who need to become leaders, the teams that have to hold together through a merger or a layoff scare, the new hires who need to be productive by Friday.
He founded Column 13 in 2008 and, over sixteen years, built growth consultancies and creative studios serving healthcare, staffing, technology, and nonprofit organizations. Today he leads culture and communications through change as a fractional CMO for a national EHR SaaS company, advises a YC-founded AI voice-agent startup, and heads Column 13's people-consulting practice from the Southeast.
He's a storyteller by wiring: a longtime Dungeon Master who has spent years running a table full of people through a shared story, reading the room, and making everyone else the hero. He brings the same instinct to culture work. The leader's job isn't to win the scene. It's to get the whole party through it.
- Based
- Jacksonville, Florida. Working nationally.
- Since
- Founded Column 13 in 2008.
- Today
- Fractional CMO, national EHR SaaS. Advisor, YC-founded AI startup.
Seven moves that make a leader.
The same seven took a developer in his early twenties to Head of Front-End Development at a major bank in three years. The story is the proof. The moves are the offer.
- 01Recognize the talent.Find the person already doing the work before anyone has given them a title for it. They are almost always visible if you are actually looking.
- 02Pour in.Time, context, and the reasoning behind the decisions, not just the decisions. What they copy is the thinking.
- 03Create space.Clear the work that keeps them small. Nobody grows into a harder job while still doing the easier one full-time.
- 04Encourage self-learning.Teach them how to find the answer so the next question does not route back through you. This is the part most managers skip.
- 05Assemble multiple mentors.One mentor produces a copy. Several produce someone with judgment of their own, which is what you were after.
- 06Give real projects.Work that actually matters, with room to fail on it and enough support to recover. Practice projects teach nothing.
- 07Apply pressure, with intention.Enough to stretch, never enough to break, and adjusted to the person in front of you. Knowing the difference is the whole job.
Who's in the room.
You are hiring a person, not a firm. Here is exactly who shows up and what he brings with him.
One operator
Alex leads every engagement himself, from the first read to the last handoff.
No bench
No junior consultant appears after the sale to run the work you were sold.
Named specialists
When a piece needs specialist hands, we say so before you sign, and you meet them.
What that has actually produced.
Twenty years across healthcare, staffing, technology, and nonprofits. Client names stay out of it. Everything else is here, in the order it should matter to you.
70% less turnover
Rebuilt recruitment, training, and the SOPs underneath both for a client in an industry then shedding staff. Turnover fell 70% and the business added 14% year-over-year growth in the same stretch.
9 months to 30 days
Built the sales onboarding system that cut the time between a new hire's first day and their first real proposal from nine months to thirty days.
264% growth, then handed over
Grew a healthcare company's lives under management 264% in a year, four states to seven, then trained the chief medical officer to run marketing and sales without him.
1 to 18, and 50+ clients
Scaled an agency from one person to a staff of eighteen serving fifty-plus clients, coaching every hire through live client work rather than a curriculum.
40% less training time
Standardized what good selling actually looked like for a B2B team and took 40% out of the time it took to get someone doing it.
$55K goal, $2.2M raised
Rebuilt a healthcare nonprofit's fundraiser as a donor experience. It cleared its $55,000 goal by $2.2 million and has run every year since.
English and Spanish
Native proficiency in both, which matters when the people side of a change has to reach the whole floor and not just the part of it that reads memos in English.
Founding member
The Wolfson Children's Challenge, an endurance event for a children's hospital that he helped start and that has run every year since.
Two board seats
Spina Bifida of Jacksonville and the Downtown Ecumenical Services Council. Governance, not letterhead.
High Impact Leadership
HILS-1, Stop At Nothing. The leadership program he went through before he started putting other people through his.
Gold ADDY and Laurel Awards
American Advertising Federation and the Northeast Florida Builders Association, from the years the craft itself was the product.
B.S., minor in Mathematics
Public Relations, University of North Florida. The minor is the part that shows up in how he scopes work.
Thirty minutes. No pitch.
Tell us what's happening. We'll tell you what we'd do about it, including when the honest answer is that you don't need us.