My Career Narrative

I've been reading about the importance of revisiting your work history and creating a career story, which I've actually had to do as part of the Butler MBA program twice now. This is a third draft on the topic, and the first that I've felt reasonable enough to share with a larger audience.

My work life also began in Junior High, during the summer between 7th and 8th grade, as an under the table office manager, organizing schedules and routes for satellite dish installers along with the occasional harrowing road trip through the Blue Ridge mountains to pick up equipment. Next I learned that job descriptions are not absolute as a kitchen dishwasher who regularly had to toss pizza crusts and butcher the occasional calf or hunting prize. Finally, I had a stint fundraising at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, where I started to learn that I had a knack for talking to people, overcoming objections and finding mutually satisfactory outcomes. 

               After High School I spent some time walking the earth, so to speak. My older brother and I couch-surfed through Amsterdam all the way down to NATO headquarters in Belgium, visiting Waterloo and Paris along the way. This firmly cemented my love of experiencing new cultures and international travel. Then I took a job installing security systems in self-storage facilities in the Midwest and along the Eastern Seaboard. After a few months of not getting paid, I came back to Indianapolis, got a job assembling computers in a factory, then transitioned that experience into a too long stint in retail technical support via Best Buy’s Geek Squad. 

               Geek Squad actually taught me a lot of lessons. I learned how to treat people equitably and with kindness, even in situations when they were angry and unkind. I learned how to keep my head when those around me weren’t. I learned how to logically and methodically solve a problem and learned to love checklists for procedural work. Most of all I learned how to work hard, pulling 80 hours weeks during the big holiday sales events and back to school season. 

               After 9 years Best Buy went through a rough patch with and let go a large number of seasoned workers, myself included. I was able to leverage my technical and customer service skills into a deployment technician role at Netfor, and then shortly was offered the role of Logistics Manager, overseeing their warehouse and deployment operations for the final months of a multi-year project. This was one of the most satisfying roles in my early career as it combined raw physical labor (shipping/receiving and warehousing) along with solving complicated puzzles (developing an inventory process, imaging and deploying 100’s of USB drives, and logistical operations for a global POS system installation project. Once that project wound down I shifted to Account Management/Continual Service Improvement, where I learned about business process analysis, account management and DevOps. 

               All good things must come to an end, and Netfor had to make a pivot which led them to release most of their middle management team, myself included.  After a bit of networking via LinkedIn, I moved from Business Process Analysis into a Business Analyst role for BCD Meetings & Events. In the span of a year I learned about the strategic meetings management industry, special SMM considerations for pharma companies, SQL, SSRS, the software development lifecycle and requirements elicitation. The next few years I expanded on this and worked with BCD to build their first enterprise data warehouse, then a new business process around Business Analytics, then a department dedicated to Business Intelligence and Analytics, with an Agile environment. The technical and business skills that I took from BCD were valuable, but I also took away many lessons in customer service, business storytelling and learning and development. 

               After 9 years with BCD I made a switch over to Carlson Wagonlit Travel, taking a role as a Senior Business Insights Consultant. This role was supposed to allow me to focus mostly on new product development with some time spent with my client as a consultant, but soon after signing, the role transitioned to being a purely client dedicated and ultimately proved to be not the best fit. Still, I came away with some valuable skills – advanced Excel skills, a deeper knowledge of corporate business travel and a higher level of analytical skills than I developed at BCD. While at Carlson I realized that my passion lies with finding ways to leverage technology and data to help clients get to actionable insights faster or to find new application of technology to solve business problems.

               The arc of my career tells an interesting story. I’m consistently drawn to roles that require me to think on my feet and my desire to be a lifelong learner. Standing up business processes and solving problems with judicious application of technology, analysis or high explosives. Learning new tools or applications thereof has always been a part of each role that I’ve taken, and I’ve discovered that I like to move from project to project, always learning and growing.  My current set of platforms are SSIS, SSRS, Visual Studio, SQL, Tableau and a whole host of other tools. My leadership style has evolved as well. I strive to be a catalytic leader, never asking anyone on my team to do something that I wouldn’t do myself and finding ways to enable them to give more of themselves than they thought possible. I want every voice to be heard and I want them to also constantly grow and develop as leaders.