Melissa Lopez is CEO of Onyx Offsites and Trainings, an experimental education company that provides custom-retreats, executive training, team building and wellness initiatives for organizations all over the world. 

Originally from Phoenix, Ariz., Melissa came to San Diego for college, studying at the University of San Diego. After she graduated, she decided to stay in town to accept an advertising and marketing position. As her marketing skills grew, Melissa was able to observe the transition of in-person marketing to interactive advertising, largely due to the introduction of the internet. Melissa began to gain steady influence at Castle Advertising, a former advertising agency, and then consistently moved on to other companies, helping build each organization’s digital marketing division. 

Eventually, she co-founded Katana Media with current Analytics Ventures Managing Partner Andreas Roell (acquired by BVAccel, another San Diego company). While running her own company, Melissa was also offered a board position in Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where she learned the importance of having a lifelong learner mindset, even as a CEO. She continued to grow as an entrepreneur, and after Katana was acquired, she built another company called DataQ that offered e-commerce tools to analyze first-party data and insights. DataQ was eventually acquired by another San Diego company, Power Digital Marketing.

After selling DataQ, Melissa joined Onyx in early 2020, a month before the pandemic hit, and immediately had to make hard decisions to survive. Melissa focused on downsizing and finding a new way for Onyx to provide its services. Everything was originally done in an in-person group gathering.However, the inability to gather in groups forced her to look for a new virtual solution. Her and her team began to focus on making activities as interactive as possible, such as sending materials for wine tasting, or having virtual game shows. The pandemic forced a new productization that was predominantly virtual, which succeeded despite the initial setbacks. 

Onyx had a huge breakthrough with many companies, as the pandemic made organizations focus on how to connect teams through technology now more than ever. Listen in to hear about Melissa’s transformative experience in San Diego’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and how Onyx plans to expand.

 

Melissa Lopez Favorite Tacos:

Lucha Libre in Mission Hills

 

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Thanks to our partners at Cox Business for their support in enabling us to grow the San Diego ecosystem.