Who I Am

She didn’t find her path. She built it.

35+ years. 14 countries. Two languages. One obsession: making businesses actually work — not on paper, in practice.

Gillian Parkinson Farfán, operating partner

My career didn’t follow a path. It built one.

I started in franchising with Yum Brands across Latin America. That was the school. I learned how a global brand reaches a Spanish-speaking market — and how often it doesn’t. I learned how to translate a corporate operating model into a local one without losing what made the original work. I learned what scales and what doesn’t.

From there, I went inside Liquimoly Chile. The CEO was preparing to sell the company. In year one, I rebuilt the operating model from the ground up — marketing department from scratch, sales contracts renegotiated win-win, brand repositioned through the Chilean motocross team, training infrastructure that would last after I left. Year-one results: +36% revenue, −10% costs.

By year four, I’d done something my Yum Brands experience told me was sitting there for someone to claim: I was one of three people who wrote the development agreement that opened the South and Central American Spanish-speaking region for the parent company. The German marketing materials had been in two languages. I had spent years building Spanish-language marketing in Chile that worked. The opportunity was real. The framework didn’t exist until I built it.

Then came Trinidad. My family is from there. Venezuela was coming apart. The Liquimoly years had earned me distribution rights in Trinidad and a path my family could use. I ran that business for thirteen years and sold it to my brother — on real terms, because family doesn’t mean discount. Family means doing it properly.

I’ve worked with restaurants, wellness practitioners, nonprofits, family businesses, transformation leaders, and Fortune-brand corporate operations. From Margarita Island to Caracas to Santiago to Philadelphia. I am obsessive about order. Dyslexic, which means I see problems from angles most people miss. I dropped out of school at fifteen. I’ve outperformed expectations in every room I’ve walked into. Make of that what you will.

I work in English and Spanish. I understand the US Hispanic market from the inside — not from a report. The fastest growing segment of US small business is Hispanic-owned, and almost nobody is serving them at this level.

I don’t hand clients a deck and walk away. I come in. I stay. I direct execution until it’s working. The goal is always the same: a business that runs — and a founder who can finally step out of the middle of it.

I don’t have a résumé. I have evidence. Sixty years of it. And I’m just getting started.

Beyond the Work

Things I love when I’m not in the work.

Scuba diving Sailing Dancing Soap making Quantum physics Nature & animals AI & technology Education Nonprofits

If you’re reading this at 2am wondering what comes next — that’s exactly who I work with.

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