April Employee Spotlight | Blake Bonilla

Our employee spotlight series will celebrate employees’ professional journeys, share personal stories and highlight how they have contributed positively to our company.

1. What’s your role and day-to-day like? I mainly focus on accounting work, but also provide office-wide support. Because of my role I never really know what the day will bring me, but I enjoy the variety!
2. Tell us about a project success story and how you were involved. When we set up the project Lake Bluff Storage, we opened separate jobs for Phase 1 and Phase 2. It turned out that the owner wanted it under one job, so I had to combine the pay applications monthly. ?Lake Bluff was paid out by a title company and there were a lot of moving parts between the two projects making it difficult to invoice. When I took over cash receipts for title company projects, I realized that our AR and AP had a variance of over $200,000. I spent many hours investigating the pay applications, invoices, and cash receipts for the jobs, and successfully reduced that variance to $0.
3. If you’re ordering take out for dinner, what is your favorite type of food and from where? My favorite place to go out to eat is The Walnut Speakeasy in Elgin. Everything on their menu is great but my go-to is their spicy bone-in chicken wings. Go on Thursdays if you want to take advantage of the wing special!
4. What’s a fun fact about you that most of your colleagues don’t know? I’m a big fan of horror movies and am currently trying to work through a list of the cult classics. I recently watched Scream for the first time and it’s now one of my favorites!
5. What are 3 things that are on your bucket list? 1. Go to Greece; 2. Learn how to surf; 3. Go yachting!