Working in the food service industry, I twice was
elevated to roles where I oversaw the store for the shift. At Quizno’s that was
only usually me and one other person, but by the time I was at Casa, that meant
that sometimes there were 20 people working who I had to make sure were
coordinating service to the customers by all stakeholders so that food would go
out and the money would come back in and all transactions were accounted for at
the end of the night, and the prep was completed for the next shifts and the
restaurant was clean before leaving. I was also involved in higher-level
strategic decisions about staffing and menu items, though I was not directly
responsible for these decisions. One of the key responsibilities was managing
the labor levels. I had to ensure that sales were in line with the staffing in
the moment to ensure we weren’t losing money by paying too many people to just
stand around. Thankfully I was usually able to work with under 10% labor as
pizza is a relatively high margin food.
Then there was a transition period. During this
transition period, I worked jobs that were related to my education at the time.
I taught Chemistry at WVU and Saint Rita and English at Kansas State
University. I also worked as a reporter for three different newspapers. Two of
these were student papers, but one was the region’s main daily paper. These
positions all represent similar skill sets that are hard to quantify. I was
able to work autonomously under my different supervisors and editors, who I all
had to ultimately answer for. There were additional stakeholders in the readers
and the students and their parents who were the ultimate consumers of my work.
I wrote in genre-specific ways and developed soft skills both in reporting and
in teaching. Interpersonal communication is so important because you must show
that no matter what your ultimate role you are selling to people the necessary
intimacy. They should believe that you are in the same boat as you are. It is a
collaborative and not an adversarial process.
Ultimately, making things a collaborative process has
been my management style for good or ill. I have always been of the opinion
that you shouldn’t ask someone to do something unless you were willing and able
to do it to. For me that is the essence of leadership. We are all in this
together, and we are working towards similar goals. If you need help doing the
essence of what the organization does and I can step in, I will. There’s an
important balance though. People must be trusted to work on their own and
present the results that come and be self-directed. You cannot just jump in
arbitrarily. This is as true as it is making pizzas as it is making sure
someone has submitted all the billing to the state.
This leads into the last six years at CSS. I started
at CSS as an intern for a couple of months. In that time as an intern, my role
was limited. I entered in paper billing sheets into the computer system and
helped generate invoices from the internal system that would be in turn entered
into external systems to create billing claims from the state. I made enough of
an impression that a month or so after the internship ended, I was invited to
replace my former supervisor when she left the agency for a different position.
I was in that role for over three years, and as I gained experience the role
grew. It became not just tracking the A/R and the payments in the internal
billing system (I would generate reports from these activates that would be
entered in the financial system) but also receiving money for the participants
and tracking their spending, as well as invoicing families for more billing. I
supervised up to three people in this role.
As that role grew, I became familiar with the inner
workings of the agency. An additional task was to gather the statistical and
usage data for our participants’ usage of different programs offered by the
agency. Various funding bodies ask their own specific questions about the
number of clients and the programs they use and I had to know based on our
internal codes how to report this.
This knowledge of the internal workings of the agency
helped me in what was the biggest project I undertook at CSS. Simultaneous with
an effort to reduce paper use in the agency, I was one of the key people in a
project to replace the legacy internal payroll, billing, and record-keeping
system with a new uncorrupted database. This was a multi-year project on top of
the regular duties of the agency. Though the developer had a system he expected
we would be able to use with little customization, we ultimately found the
needs of the agency to be more complex. As such, we had to pull apart our
process, define them, and then reenter client data and test the integrity of
the database and create reports that answered the questions our funders asked –
all hand in hand with the developer.
Gaining this internal organization knowledge meant
that my role kept expanding. I was promoted to the Accounting manager with the
responsibility now also over payables. It was not much longer when I was
promoted again to Director of Finance. As Director, I handed off most of the
responsibilities I had inherited to the other people in the department. My new
role was working hand in hand with the CFO as a second in command situation. I
learned to prepare the income statement and the balance sheet for external
reporting, aided in the annual budget, and prepared grant applications for our
various funders as well as create the reports to those funders based on
statistical reports generated from the new database we had worked so long on.
In this last role I had less autonomy and I worry that I did not learn enough
of the accounting to go with my institutional knowledge side.
My journey has not only been professional though. This
also tracks back to my initial round of college. I have both writing and quantitative
skills and liked to exercise them both. I was a chemistry major until my junior
year where I switched to English because I saw myself as a writer much more
than I saw myself as a chemist. That English degree led to the grad school in
English and those transitional jobs. In the liberal arts is all about reading
widely and thinking critically and being able to apply this to the world you
encounter. Everything becomes, pace
Derrida, a text to be read.
I’ve never stopped learning, both formally and
informally. I set up my blogs and
started reviewing on amazon as a way to continue engaging critically with the
world – and to help create some audience for my more creative writings.
I also went back to school to help leverage my
intellect and skills into something marketable. First it was through Chicago
Career Tech, where I received certification in medical coding and billing. I
was also certified by a third-party group, though that certification has since
lapsed. Through CSS I was in the Nonprofit Leadership Program at Notre Dame.
That made me realize that if I wanted to grow in my career I would need to
continue my education even more. I took and did well the basic accountings and
economics classes as a preparation for the MBA at Concordia. In the last ten
years with about 80 hours attempted of college and graduate level work, my
lowest grade was one A-.
