Early Career
After high school, I worked full time and commuted an hour each way three days a week to U.C. Riverside. After two years of repeated class misplacements and trying to work “group” projects with classmates who didn’t work and didn’t commute, I was not happy and turned my focus to my career.
My first job in the transportation industry was with GI Trucking. I was hired for data entry at their corporate offices/west coast hub in La Mirada, CA. After a month on the job, I was promoted to Hawaiian Freight Manager and was responsible for a dozen container loads per week to the various pacific islands.
Unlike road freight which was hauled and priced primarily by weight and class, containers had to fill to the brim and cube out to at least 95% capacity in order to sail. The best way to describe it was like playing the video game Tetris. I had to monitor all shipments coming my way and plan the loads accordingly with the goal of getting all my containers loaded and to port by cutoff in order to make the service commitments to our customers.
I was there for one year before I met two men who had recently started a company doing set up and dismantle work in the trade show industry.
My daughter Ashleigh & I, 2007
Expo Network
In the early nineties, the trade show industry was booming. My new post quickly evolved and I went from receptionist to office manager quickly. I was given the opportunity to become an account executive and further supplement my income with commission. I was given one show to test market and I landed twenty-one jobs.
Being a small independent contractor, the CFO and I managed all administrative tasks from HR to payroll to invoicing and everything in between. There were no “departments” and I became proficient in nearly every task required to keep the business humming along.
I helped create a custom database application in Microsoft Access that eventually handled all CRM data for current and prospective clients as well as all work order, invoicing and warehousing data. The standing joke was that I did everything except drive the forklift.
In 1997, Expo Network went national and I went from managing labor crews in 7 markets to more than twenty union managed convention jurisdictions. I was barely able to take two weeks off to give birth.
I’ll never forget packing into the conference room for our first national division-head meeting. Elbow to elbow, we plotted our course to industry domination while passing around my baby bouncing from knee to knee while we made our expansion plans.
September 11, 2001 was the beginning of the end of my career at Expo Network. At that point, I was a single parent and decided to relocate to Arizona, intending to continue my work remotely as well as build the Phoenix market for the company. Six months later and six weeks to closing on the new house I just had built, a change of plans had me looking for a new position.
In my search for a new job, I aimed for a support role with the idea that home ownership would be my primary focus and I would let someone else run the show. For this reason, I expected a pay cut, but with the difference in cost of living I figured I would be okay. My third interview was for an executive administrative assistant position with Central Freight Lines. The day after the interview they called and offered me the job starting at more than my previous base salary.
Central Freight Lines
I was hired to support four C level executives and the company’s engineer at the Scottsdale executive offices. They all traveled every week and I was alone in the office left to do my own training. I reached out to the local terminal manager and asked him to introduce me to the various software components that were used to run the business.
That was all I needed to dig in and look around for opportunities to be productive. I found open receivables for truck terminal rents that indicated subtenants were not keeping up with their rent payments, so I dug in to rectify that. It turned out that getting those rents caught up and “right-sizing” the company’s truck terminals was overdue on the CEO’s project list. Right away I began to collect data on our current operational needs and charted it up against the overall size of each terminal to determine what excess we had.
In no time I had gathered data from all 67 facilities, presented it to the executive team and had a plan of action to execute for every location. A short four months later, I was putting together a finance deal inclusive of a sale/leaseback transaction and mortgage financing on three other properties that would generate $70 million in cash for the truck line. It was a tremendously involved project that firmly planted me into commercial real estate and gave me a fantastic hands-on education. I worked hand in hand with a well respected midwestern law firm that I would continue to work with the duration of my time at Central.
I spent the next 13 years and worked with many wonderful people at Central. When I lost my mother suddenly in 2017, I finally decided it was time for a change.
Post Great Recession
The market crash and subsequent recession changed the business climate instantly and we had to adapt accordingly to save as many jobs as possible. Working a business model of shrinking to profitability, we found ourselves involved in a multitude of contracts whose terms no longer reflected the current business climate.
Landlords quickly went from doubling the rent year over year to being grateful their truck terminal wasn’t sitting vacant. As more trucking company’s folded, there became more facilities in each major market than there were operations to use them.
Within two months of the market crash, I negotiated lease rate reductions of $1 million annually. Most leases were month to month and got paid late. I kept an open line of communication with each landlord and spoke with the local real estate brokers regularly to keep my finger on the pulse of the market. In most cases, I achieved 100% late fee forgiveness and we never lost a location. When I left the company seven years later, a majority of those reductions were still in place, paying the same month to month rate we had negotiated post-crash.
Agreements in all departments were facing default, no longer representative of a booming market. I began talking with other departments vendors and negotiated an alternative we could both live with, so more and more of these situations came at me from all departments. Things like facility leases, human resource support with firms like Monster and Career Builder and leased office equipment, to name a few.I morphed into being the chief negotiator for post-recession damage control.
The White Mountains
In March 2017, my mother suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. My dad and I sold our houses and relocated to the white mountains. Thinking I was going to be retired from then on, I focused on the new house and taking care of my family. Life on the mountain is vastly different than any place I had ever been prior. The first time I engaged with business on the mountain, I was looking to have some glass cut to protect some table tops and replace a window that currently had a solid frosted piece of glass with an actual window I could open.
It didn’t take long before my frustration was through the roof. Getting a contractor to call back was like pulling teeth and getting one to show up was near impossible. I got a crash course in what was termed “mountain time”. The one contractor I got to show up was never heard from after the walk through and I ended up measuring and ordering the glass myself for will call pick up.
I used my new found freedom to explore things I had always wanted to do and learn. I taught myself how to trade stocks and eventually crypto-currency. I read everything I could find on blockchain and am still fascinated with the technology. I taught myself to work with wood and built shelves in our pantry, which at the time only had two. I learned to do my own oil changes on the cars. I spent some time honing my skills with the sewing machine and got into all sorts of different types of crafts.
I dove into learning to make a website and to date, I have tried nearly every major website building software offered. I started buying domains and for a short time, looked at flipping them as a side hustle. I learned about hosting, servers, VPN’s and e-commerce. I am still actively teaching myself in this space, with my current focus on SEO and social media marketing.
Since then, my professional life has seen many ups and downs. I lived in a log cabin in the mountains for a while and used the solitude to teach myself to build websites, trade stocks, learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency and many other things I had wanted to learn for years. It was a time of reflection and self discovery that I will always cherish. I was an office manager for a CPA, I cleaned houses and worked for an HOA management company for a while.
Currently, I have this virtual assistant business and am I the process of launching a Youtube channel. I still have numerous business ideas I would like to try, if you’re interested in hearing more, I would love to discuss them anytime. Thanks for reading this all the way through and I am grateful for any opportunities to work with new people and make a difference.