We have sat in your seat

Jess Caudill most recently spent eight years in the engine room of a vertical SaaS company serving the hospitality and events industry. She joined in a customer support role and left as Chief Operating Officer and Acting CEO when the company was acquired. In between, she partnered directly with the founders to evolve the business from a scrappy, founder-led operation into a disciplined, scalable organization — and helped grow annual recurring revenue from under $1 million to nearly $3 million. When the company was acquired in 2026, she exited at closing. That outcome wasn't the destination. It was the runway.

Long before she was running operations for a SaaS company, Jess was building something else: a deep expertise in how people learn. Her early career ran through corporate training, curriculum design, and adult education — work that taught her to think not just about what systems to build, but how to make sure real people actually adopt them. That thread runs through everything she does at Alta Velas. The CRMs she builds get used. The processes she documents get followed. The infrastructure she designs outlasts her engagement. She holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Music in Orchestral Performance — a background that sharpened her discipline, her ear for nuance, and her belief that precision and creativity are not opposites.

Jess lives in Loveland, Colorado, with her two sons, William and Oliver, and her rescue dog, Dante. She is passionate about music, travel, and the relentless work of helping small businesses grow into what they were always capable of becoming. She co-founded Alta Velas because she had spent eight years watching businesses stay stuck — not from lack of talent or ambition, but from lack of the right operational foundation. She built the agency she would have wanted to call.

Jessica Caudill, Co-Founder and President

Courtney Schwartzel didn't wait for the right moment to build something. In 2011, she founded Pilot Management — a boutique marketing, project management, and consulting agency — and spent the next fifteen years proving that the best operators are the ones who never stop doing the work. Over that decade and a half, she embedded herself as a fractional CMO and operational partner for businesses across six-plus industries: event production, AV and architectural lighting, manufacturing, property management, ecommerce, and coaching. Her clients didn't get a marketer. They got someone who stayed until the thing was actually working.

In 2018, Courtney earned her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification — not because she needed credentials, but because she has always believed that great marketing without operational discipline is just noise. That philosophy defines everything she builds. Strategy without execution is fiction. Campaigns without systems don't scale. The clearest indicator of her value to a client isn't a launch — it's what happens six months later, when the work is still running. At Alta Velas, Courtney brings fifteen years of cross-industry pattern recognition and the rare ability to hold both the marketing vision and the operational machinery in the same hand, at the same time.

Courtney lives in Loveland, Colorado, with her husband Jason, her son Alden, and two dogs. Off the clock, you'll find her hosting people around the backyard, deep in a crime documentary, or just enjoying a good back porch evening. She co-founded Alta Velas after years of watching what happened when the right operational support arrived at the right moment — and recognizing that the partnership she'd built with Jess was exactly that kind of moment. What started as a weekly accountability call in a shared co-working space became a business. What became a business became Alta Velas.