President and CEO, The Flinn Foundation
Why did you decide to attend Leeds? My father did his Ph.D. at CU when I was a young and impressionable child. I fell in love with the campus and especially the library and always intended to go to CU. When I followed through on that dream, I took advantage of all the campus had to offer, including courses from departments across different schools. My decision to attend and graduate from the business school was purely pragmatic: I wanted to be able to get a job when I graduated. I was also very involved with AIESEC--an international organization that matches students with professional internship and volunteer opportunities--and that experience motivated me even more to study business.
How did your time at CU impact you as a person? I was very involved in AIESEC, which was housed at the business school. We had an office there, which almost became my second home. AIESEC enabled me to get out into the business community and talk about how to contribute to organizations. Just as important, the other members of AIESEC were really high-performing students and they were a significant peer group for me. Remarkably, I have remained very close to this group of individuals to this day, and they are some of my closest friends. It was also through this group that my early career took me to Europe, increasing my experiences and network exponentially.
Where has life taken you since graduating? I’ve had a fortunate and interesting career that all began at the University of Colorado Business School. Upon graduation, I moved to the U.K. to work as a project manager for a large British brewery. That job was organized as an AIESEC traineeship, and I was fortunate to pivot into a full-time position that lasted three years. Within that role, I learned my love of marketing and data. I also loved education, although I knew I didn’t have the patience to be a good teacher. In a roundabout way, that first job led me to the software industry and my early career in tech in Silicon Valley. I had the great fortune of following a serial entrepreneur through two very successful start ups: Prescription Learning and Educational Management Group.
Although I loved the startup world and had completed my MBA in entrepreneurship, my next stop was remarkably different. I joined Arizona Public Service Company and over the next two decades, I took on many roles across the company, from energy efficiency and customer experience to communications and economic development. I ended my career at APS as the Vice President of Resource Management and Acquisition.
Most recently, I became the President and CEO of the Flinn Foundation, a private foundation that focuses on four Arizona industries: biosciences, arts and culture, civic leadership, and higher education. I love the breadth of our activities and the ability to use my skills to work across Arizona. Our mission is to improve the quality of life in Arizona to benefit future generations, which makes it remarkably easy to come to work each day.
What is one piece of advice/best practice that has stuck with you throughout your career? Find out what your customers actually think and feel—not what you assume they think and feel. My marketing professor at CU taught us to remember that we are not the customer, and that by the nature of working in a company or an industry, we are biased; we lose our ability to see things from the customer’s perspective. This has been really solid advice that can be applied to nearly every scenario that I’ve encountered.
June 2018