Karla Mendez is the Bicultural M&A Expert BP Selected to Move into Mexico

Karla Mendez built a career of bridging gaps, opening new lines of business, and leading with creativity and passion

Karla Mendez, Senior Counsel, BP

BY BILLY YOST, HISPANIC EXECUTIVE

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the opening of a gas station on the outskirts of Mexico City was an ordinary day in March 2017. Instead, it was a landmark moment for BP. They were the first global retail brand to open a fueling station in Mexico in decades, dating back to restrictive energy policies from the 1930s. Karla Mendez was also contacted in 2017 by BP, asking if she might be interested in helping lead this monumental growth in new territory.

Mendez, senior counsel for Mexico downstream and midstream as well as USA BP Pulse (the company’s electric vehicle charging business), says it’s not her style to look for the spotlight but, ultimately, her reputation got her noticed by one of the world’s largest fuel companies. This has allowed her to continue finding exciting opportunities within BP.

The senior counsel’s biggest draw is also what caused her a fair amount of grief while she was growing up. Mendez is truly bicultural, both in identity and in business. She was born in Mexico City and she moved to the United States when her father’s work transferred him to California. She lived there until she was fifteen. The family returned to Mexico and Mendez expected to feel like she’d come home.

“I got back to Mexico and felt like I wasn’t as Mexican as I thought,” Mendez remembers. “It was a bit of a culture shock, which is such an odd feeling when you were born in this place and grew up thinking you were as Mexican as you can get.”

Karla Mendez BP

Photo by Ashley Patranella

Mendez went to law school in Mexico and returned to the US for to obtain a graduate degree in law. That cultural duality began to transform into a superpower of sorts. Mendez got a job working in Mexico for a Mexican construction company that was also publicly traded on Wall Street. She slowly started amassing M&A and securities compliance work. The lawyer likens M&A work to taking x-rays of companies to learn how every line of business was intertwined and how they each worked together to create a unified whole.

“That work just made me realize how important it is to have a leader that gets it,” Mendez says. “They have to have that vision; they have to be able to pull the right strings to make magic happen. It’s something I noticed very early in my career.”

The senior counsel learned how to be creative and solutions-oriented in a business setting, two highly valued and fairly rare qualities when it comes to type of work where lawyers can often be risk-averse and therefore not see eye-to-eye with the business.

“I have to give BP a lot of credit, because this organization has provided me with opportunities while not making me choose between progressing my career or being a good parent.”

Karla Mendez

During her career, Mendez has had a great deal of time to reflect on the role of working mothers, the often massive disparity between what is expected of working mothers and working fathers, and just what it takes to try and “have it all” in terms of a family and a career. Mendez says when considering the “village” it takes to raise a child, employers need to be brought into the conversation.

“I have to give BP a lot of credit, because this organization has provided me with opportunities while not making me choose between progressing my career or being a good parent,” Mendez explains. “Women traditionally, or at least in our Hispanic culture, can be more prone to stalling their own careers because of raising their families. There’s a lot of work to be done, both in our family culture as well as in most companies’ cultures about achieving that equity, and I try to be as vocal as possible about this, to my husband, family and colleagues. It takes all of us and BP is a great example.”

After moving back to the US, BP entered the picture. After massive energy reforms in 2016, BP was going to be the first global business to participate in Mexico’s

Karla Mendez, BP

Photo by Ashley Patranella

energy sector and Mendez was the right pick. She had M&A experience, had worked both sides of the border with regularity, and while it was her first go in the energy space, the lawyer’s boss was convinced she would learn the ropes fast.

“I was the sole lawyer in charge of setting up this new venture in this fast-paced environment,” Mendez explains. “This was completely new terrain for everyone in the industry and there weren’t any guideposts. There wasn’t anyone I could reach out to who had been through this in Mexico because it was a brand-new market; and even if someone had, there were brand-new laws being published that would have changed everything anyway.”

At one point, Mendez and her team were opening a new gas station in Mexico every single day. It was all-systems go in pure growth mode. That was a victory, but then came time for yet another new reality; growth mode only lasts so long for a reason. Eventually, stability needs to be established and you have to begin operating a business.

Mendez says transitioning to a “steady state” of operations was also a learning experience. What defines normal for a line of business that didn’t previously exist? The BP team had to define it and begin operation up to 500 gas stations in Mexico. But even “steady” offers its fair share of challenges.

“There is so much about this role that consisted in translating, but I’m not just talking about contracts or language,” Mendez says. “These are two different cultures with different ways of interacting with government officials, different ways of working, and I think I’m just naturally good at interpreting and bridging those differences. I would like to think I’ve been an important part of helping integrate a broader cultural understanding of how we do business and connect with our Mexican counterparts.”

The feeling of doing something entirely new is an experience Mendez would like to pass on to up-and-coming lawyers. The attorney has often had to find her own space, build out new skill sets, and, frankly, experience a lot of discomfort in the interim. She hopes more attorneys will seek out those experiences, “be curious, get out of your comfort zone, stretch your skills and, eventually, you’ll find your footing,” Mendez says.

That curiosity and reinvention keep getting Mendez thrown into new settings. She’s been deeply involved in the growth of BP’s EV efforts since 2021. More recently, she has been working with the company’s novel biofuels business. Mendez didn’t have experience in either of these areas, but she’s proven time and time again that she’s unafraid to learn something new and will dive right in with the business to try to make these ventures a success.

Hispanicexecutive.com