How did you get to where you are now in your career? What personal qualities do you have that you think helped contribute to your success in leadership roles?
To get where I am now in my career, I really had to be hard working and resourceful. After a divorce, I was faced with finding a way to support myself and my children. I had no college education or steady work experience to rely on, since I had spent about eight years as a stay at home mom. When I first started my career it was as a commercial hvac dispatcher, a role that unfortunately hardly paid enough to make ends meet. This was certainly an emotionally and financially draining time, especially since I was trying to take care of my children while working. My legal experiences made me interested in the law, and I ended up getting a job at an attorney’s office as a paralegal. One of our client’s was a CEO of a credit card processing company who got to know me for my work ethic and personality. One day, he approached me and said, “I think I have an opportunity that you would be really great for.” I was interested, and he explained it was for a business development management position. I thought it sounded like a wonderful opportunity, but felt I didn’t have the experience. He told me, go out, make them like you, and we will teach you the rest. And so I did just that. I started the role as business development manager, securing all of the accounts, and ended up being promoted into executive leadership.
When I left that business, I pivoted into commercial furniture. About six months after I started in commercial renting, the pandemic hit. I was hit with an ironic, vulnerable situation: I was renting out office furniture and there was no one in the office. Still, I got creative and was still able to achieve my goals for 2020. Whenever someone is in times of stress, I encourage them to take a step back, breathe, and analyze the situation at hand. That is exactly what I did: I took a step back to see what was going on in the market. One thing I found was that there was still construction going on in Nashville, and so I was able to still achieve my business goals for that year. I was then recruited to sell office furniture and became a top producer in the country. I worked with integrity and diligence, and it paid off: I was then approached by investors in my network with the opportunity to run and rebrand a company they were looking to acquire. I definitely take pride in being someone people want to work with and think of when they have leadership positions arise.
You were Mrs. Tennessee Globe 2005 and went on to co-chair the Mrs. Globe Alumni Association. How has that experience shaped your career path?
Being involved with Mrs. Tennessee Globe and the Mrs. Globe Alumni Association certainly shaped my career path and the way I move through the world. My experiences in competition and serving on the board helped me as I met so many incredible women from not only across the country but around the world, women who opened my eyes to see what is possible for us to achieve. I also learned a lot through the classes offered by the organization, as they taught me how to apply myself and make forward movement in my own life. Being a mother, being a worker-all of these things are possible with the right mindset, and the Mrs. Globe Association helped me embrace that.
How does community involvement factor into your career?
Speaking of the right mindset, I believe that being a community focused person can only help your career. I stand by a philosophy of integrity for how I move through my personal life and work life. It is important to me to always self-reflect and see how I can grow as a person, and a huge component of this is leading with integrity. Strong relationships with your personal and business networks can be incredibly rewarding if you lead with positive intention. My community involvement, from volunteering to serving on boards, has been part of the secret to my success in sales and business because I approach each relationship I make in a reciprocal way. I love connecting with people, and I can tell when I meet someone who I can connect them with, whether it is friends or business partners in my network who I think will have cohesive, successful relationships. Community involvement is all about weaving positive connections, and my success has indirectly and directly been leveraged by the relationships I’ve made in my network.
How do you balance motherhood and work? What advice would you give to working mothers?
Of course, throughout all of my work in sales, business, and the community, I have also been a mother. Motherhood is a balancing act, for sure. You have a lot of spinning plates to think about when you are a working mother–you are never just thinking about yourself. I am lucky to have a very strong support system that I give a lot of credit to. Again, a lot of my success comes back to having a tight-knit community.
What do you like to do in your free time to relax and unwind from work?
Sometimes it is hard to carve out time for yourself when you have work and children, but new experiences can really refresh you and make you even more ready to take on the world. Juggling a lot of responsibilities with others in mind means that we should also do things for ourselves. In my free time, I love to travel to new places and learn about them and see things that are authentic to the area of the country or the world that I am visiting. I love trying little boutique restaurants, delicious, authentic cuisine, and wine tasting. I also love the outdoors, going out on the boat, and relaxing on a beach. I just love having varied, unique exciting experiences in life.
Empowering women seems to be a common thread throughout your career and personal life. How would you like to see yourself continuing to empower women in the community? Do you have any career or personal goals you feel are on the horizon?
I really gain a lot of self fulfillment from work that helps empower other women, particularly women who have possibly faced similar challenges to me, because I feel like my story can serve as an example of what is possible. I have served as a regional spokesperson for the Women In Need Foundation (WIN), and on different Boards of Directors that have allowed me to give advice and talk about my personal experiences. Someone I looked up to that mentored me encouraged me to talk about my life, for they said, there could be someone out there that sharing your story makes a difference for. They may believe they can’t achieve what they want, and you’re living proof that they can. I would love to pay this mentoring experience forward and mentor someone else. In the future, I would love to continue to do work that empowers women, as in some industries, it can be a little harder to get to certain positions if you do not have the network you need to give you a boost to where you want to be. I also just want to continue doing the things that I have been doing, like staying involved in community organizations, spending time with family, working hard, and always seeking new experiences.
Throughout all the challenges and difficult decisions I’ve confronted in my life, one thing I know is that I’ve never regretted doing the right thing.
In every walk of life, I can’t control what other people do, but I can control what I do. As long as I know that I am acting from the right place, for the right reasons, it doesn’t matter what others do.
An example of this mindset in action is that over the years in my various sales and business jobs, I’ve had clients that wanted to do business with me, but I knew the particular product I had wouldn’t fit their needs.
Rather than just taking their business and giving them an ill-fit, I said to them, “I would love to work with you, but know this isn’t what you need.” I explained that I would rather do research and provide them with options that actually work. Sometimes people have even initially gotten frustrated with me because of this approach, but in the long run, every time I’ve gone the extra mile it has brought me more business.
Going out of my way to help people find what they need is a testament to the value I place in relationships, and shows that I care. Refusing to cut corners throughout my career has created the reliable, strong network that I have today.
