Let’s set the scene. It’s 2011 and I was studying U.S. History at U.C. Riverside in 2011 towards the end of the great recession. I wanted to be a history teacher and coach high school basketball. At the time, school budgets were getting slashed /*shocker*/ and there weren’t many openings for working as a teacher.
Enter J.B. Hunt Transport Inc. I was nervous at first because outside of college econ and various classes in business, I didn’t know a lick about trucking. I landed an internship with their brokerage ICS team working 3 days a week my senior year check calling and sourcing third party carriers. This senior year internship launched a career that I never saw coming.
At J.B. Hunt I went from intern, to broker, to entry level sales employee and eventually ended my time there as a dedicated operations supervisor. Fast forward to 2014, I was living in Washington at the time and I was tired of relocating for my next promotion. I settled in Tacoma and I was approached about starting a brokerage at Interstate Distributor Co, an incredible bridge in my personal growth that I will be forever grateful for.
At Interstate, we grew a team from 3 to 18 and revenue from 0 to 20 million in about 3.5 years. In the early days I was an Operations Manager when we were just a few team members in a very small office that had to keep two doors open for air flow in the summer. When we reached around 18 employees, I took over the accounts team as a Customer Service Manager. While helping run our brokerage accounts team I was also in charge of pricing all new business which I had never done before on a formal RFP level…One day I wake up to an email subject line “Interstate has found a new home.” Interstate had been sold to Heartland Express. I chose not to stay with Heartland at the time and transitioned to take a Senior Account Manager role at Knight Transportation around the merger with Swift in 2017 to be closer to family in AZ.
I enjoy challenging myself with new roles that require rapid learning and adaptation. It’s these challenges that brought me to FreightVana already prepared to face the unknown.
At Knight, I quickly learned my way around the organization. I had never worked on the OTR asset trucking side of the business but it fascinated me. I studied hard and learned Knights network & company initiatives in my role as an account manager. From the beginning, I had expressed my passion for pricing and network analysis to the leadership at Knight. I was so persistent that, 6 months later, I was moved into an Assistant General Manager role. I was told that after 3-6 months, if I learned more about the business, I could transition into a full time role as a General Manager of Pricing and Network. Fast forward about 3 days – 3 literal days – into my new assistant job, I was told, “Great news! You’re being promoted to General Manager for the Southeast!” A teammate had taken a promotion with a sister company and they needed to backfill. Over the next 3 1/2 years I learned a lot through invaluable experiences in pricing and network.
Fast forward again to June 2021. Me and 25 other teammates show up to an empty office at 0800. For all of you that have read the above and gotten here, thank you. This is where the journey is only just beginning. Sometimes we never take the time to self-reflect on the path that got us here. Throughout my whole career I’ve been consistently attacked by “imposter syndrome.” I enjoy challenging myself with new roles that require rapid learning and adaptation. It’s these challenges that brought me to FreightVana already prepared to face the unknown. I don’t know what lies ahead of me at FreightVana but I do know that I’m doing it with some of the best in the industry… and we’re coming.