Profile

I’m the CEO and founder of Vérité, a digital communications agency which was founded in 1993. We offer a variety of technologically advanced integrated services including eTools™, web redesign, and corporate identity.

I work in a corporate office building.

I work with various types of business people including sales and marketing executives, information technology professionals, graphics designers, accountants, lawyers, etc.

I begin my day by looking at production schedules. We have a big production department and I have a condensed report I review to make sure everything is on track. We operate a lot like a law firm – our people all have billable hours and we have to ensure time is getting billed and applied to projects correctly and review the business metrics. I typically have to do financial reviews two to three times per week, checking our cash flow, Accounts Receivable, budgets for new projects, etc. I also do a lot of networking and business development – meeting people, consulting with them on projects, etc.

Tenacity is very important and never losing sight of your vision and what you want to do because you will get knocked down over and over again. You also need to have good people skills, be assertive, but blend in some humility and be as considerate of others as possible. In my experience, the more you can kill people with kindness but remain diligent without pestering people, the better off you are. Typically what works for me is articulating a very clear value proposition in the first place.

I typically work 65-70 hours/week. I try to not work on weekends when possible. In the early days when I was building my business, I had to invest more time and frequently worked on weekends.

Yes, approximately 40%.

I love technology, however more than that, I still love business development. I get a lot of satisfaction out of closing the deal and bringing value to customers.

It’s important to note that my company has always been self-funded. The challenges in the beginning are very different than the challenges today. The challenges in the beginning were more about not enough hours in the day, needing to bill people, manage people and get the work done. The sacrifices your family makes and their willingness to be on board with that gets tough. As the company grew, technologies kept changing and that was a huge endeavor to manage what technologies we were going to implement and offer. Another challenge was figuring out where people were going to convene. For the first six years, I had people in my house all the time and actually had to redo my carpet when I moved the business out of the house. Because we were working from my house, clients tended to think we could work after 10:00 p.m. and it was pretty much 24 x 7. We then moved into an office space which we outgrew and are now located in a commercial space with room for more growth.

Those were the early day challenges. Today the challenges are more about staying on top of it all - making sure we know more than other people do about marketing channel communications and the tools it takes to back that up. Another challenge is managing the financials – we’ve been profitable every year and I run a very tight ship financially, but it takes a lot of work and dedication. I’ve actually been embezzled before so you have to spend a lot time with outside lawyers and accountants doing due diligence.

My family and friends inspire me more than anything else. I have had some great mentors, but at the end of the day those closest to me inspire me the most.

I had more mentors as I got older. Early in my career – it was the experience on my internship that changed my path. In my job search I fell into enterprise computing and realized I loved technology and business.

Several years ago I brought in some consultants to evaluate my business. Based on their evaluation they advised me to focus on web development only and eliminate creative services. If I had taken their advice it could have negatively impacted my business. We recognized in some cases, Creative Services was helping sell the technology side and decided to maintain our business model which was a positive decision for my company and it has paved the way for recurring revenues for our business.

In order to narrow down career options, have an open mind. Think about your personality and what it is you really want to do. There’s a lot to explore and if it isn’t your real passion, it’s really hard to maintain.

All in all there is not a lot I would do differently.

Golf & ski.

The Women Tech Council, an organization I founded in 2007, is a passion for me (www.womentechcouncil.org). The Women Tech Council is designed to be an advocate for women who are currently in technology roles or working for technology companies in technology related roles. We’ve seen tremendous response and it has now grown to more than 200 members. I’ve also served on various boards, including Chairman of the Board for the Utah Information Technology Association.

My background was rather multifaceted. I actually went to school majoring in law enforcement. I did an internship with the Santa Clara police department and although I wanted to make a difference, it was not a good fit for my personality and interests. Some of the characteristics about myself that made me want to go into law enforcement pushed me toward sales, marketing and entrepreneurship. I then began my career with Mohawk Data Sciences.

I spent twelve years in California in various sales and marketing positions working with hardware and software products. When I relocated to Utah in 1990 the market was somewhat flat and thru a Headhunter, I started a job with a reseller, Sony Broadcast. I loved communications and my background was technology and was then hired by a studio to produce communications for sales, marketing and training for major corporations. I later recognized a product market opportunity in the digital platform. My employer didn’t want to pursue the opportunity. I started my own company with no money and only a dell computer and laserjet 3 printer. Once we landed an opportunity with Intel, we were on our way.

Although it was challenging in the early years and technology took a while to come around, I have grown the business into a multi-million dollar company with 30 people and always been self-funded.