If you ask anyone who’s known me for more than 10 years, they would tell you I’ve had at least 4 businesses since they met me. My interest in business started when I was very young. I sold fitness memberships, cars, houses, and snacks. (The vending machine industry was not it for me.) The common thread through all my many businesses — operations. It was always about wanting to make business work and understanding how to keep it working.

I studied Hospitality Operations Management at Kennesaw State University (Hootie-hoo!) and fell in love with ops and the roles it took to run successful companies. I thought I’d end up managing a large hotel chain or restaurant, but surprisingly I ended up in retail grocery. After knocking an internship outta the park, I graduated with a full-time district manager role with Aldi.

After graduating from Aldi’s training program in just one year, I was given my own district to manage. My district was comprised of 5 super high sales volume stores in the north metro Atlanta area that were essentially in shambles. I took some time to observe and understand why turnover was high, theft was through the roof, managers were logging tons of overtime, and the teams were just unhappy.

Two months in, it hit me — the managers of these stores were good at the work they did, but they didn’t know how to lead OTHER people. So what did I do? I learned to lead too. I got in the trenches with my managers. We created systems and KPIs, we made mistakes and cried together a couple times.