My Resume Doesn't Make Sense. My Career Does.

I did not grow up dreaming about clean energy.

Or tractors. Or tuxedos, for that matter.

I grew up wanting to move to Spain, travel the world working for a magazine...taking photos and writing about adventure. I was going to be behind the camera, telling stories visually and certainly living somewhere with better weather than the Midwest. That was the plan.

Then life happened, the way it tends to do, and the plan became something else entirely.

I started my career at 19 at a local newspaper as a graphic designer. I loved the visual side of things, building ads, paginating pages, learning the press, getting ink under my fingernails. I loved the creativity of it. I even did some writing and photography for a women's magazine they printed and genuinely loved that too. But the industry was struggling. The budgets were thin. And I had a baby on the way my last semester of college, which changed the math on a lot of things pretty quickly.

I walked across that stage in December 2008 with Rori in my belly. She arrived in April 2009. And suddenly making ends meet became the primary job, with everything else organized around that.

To make more money at the newspaper I moved into ad sales. I hated it. Soliciting ads, crediting clients when the print quality was off, watching an industry start to quietly come apart at the seams... it was hard. I started teaching myself digital and web because someone had to and I figured it might as well be me. I did photography on the side, mostly senior pictures, to fill in the gaps. I did what needed doing.

Eventually I moved back closer to home and family, which meant finding something new. I interviewed for a graphic design position at a formal wear company and they looked at me and said you'd be wonderful working with wedding couples. Your energy, your eye for color and coordination, your visual instincts... you'd be great in sales.

So I started as a store manager at a local tuxedo company.

I saw an opportunity almost immediately. My store was in one of the smaller markets we served but I started building community partnerships, working with local photographers, doing grassroots marketing with basically zero budget. Our store became the highest ranking location for prom sales, outselling stores in Kansas City and and Omaha (our bigger markets at the time).

I went to leadership and asked for a marketing function. I asked for them to let me build it.

They said yes, not entirely, I still had to stay in the sales function as well. But, I built it.

By the time I left we had grown to over 110 locations across the United States. I had implemented and customized HubSpot company wide, built out our CRM strategy from scratch, trained the whole organization, and gotten deep into revenue and marketing operations because when you're that close to the data you can't help it. I had gone from store manager to Marketing Director and built something from nothing with next to no budget and a whole lot of figuring it out.

Then came the tractors.

Someone who knew me well told me to apply for a Director of Brand Management role at a John Deere dealership in Northwest Iowa. I had zero expectations. I had never worked around agricultural equipment. I hadn't grown up on a farm. I knew nothing about tractors.

I went to the interview anyway. I sat there for over an hour waiting, bleeding, almost walked out, and then two men came over and apologized because they'd written down the wrong interview time. Not exactly a great first impression.

But I stayed.

During the interview one of them asked me how I would sell a specific piece of equipment. I don't even remember the model number anymore. And I said, honestly and without hesitation: I can't sell something I don't know. What I would do is learn the product, understand the audience, figure out the features and benefits, and then I could tell you exactly what the campaign would look like. But I can't tell you anything until I know what I'm selling.

He told me later that was the moment he knew I was the right person. Not because I had the answer. Because I wasn't afraid to admit I didn't, and I already knew how I'd get there.

That's the thing about figuring it out. It's actually a skill. Not everyone has it. And it's one of the most valuable things you can bring into any room.

I loved that job and the people I worked with. But the dealership was heading toward acquisition, which is common in that industry, and I knew my contract wouldn't survive the buyout. So when a former company came back and offered me the chance to step fully into marketing without the sales component, I went back.

Then they asked me to relocate to Atlanta.

I wasn't moving my family to Atlanta.

So I started looking again. Found a role at a tech company working with primarily the U.S. Federal Government. Learned a new industry. Kept building.

Then came a mandate I wasn't comfortable with while pregnant and nursing, and I started looking again.

And then, completely out of nowhere, a LinkedIn post found me.

The CMO who would eventually hire me appeared in my feed with zero mutual connections, no shared groups, nothing linking us. Just a random post that landed in front of me at the right moment. We connected. We talked. It felt immediately like two people who had been thinking about marketing the same way for a long time and never met.

Good marketing is good marketing. Find the story. Know the audience. Build the thing.

He had to push to hire me. Not everyone was convinced that a midwestern marketer could make an impact in clean energy tech. I understood the skepticism. I also knew it didn't matter what the product was. It mattered that I would figure it out.

I've now been at GridX for four years. I've grown from Marketing Campaign Manager to Director of Marketing.

I keep coming back to the same truth every time I look at this path.

Every pivot was unpredictable. Every transition was scary. Every new industry felt like standing at the edge of something I didn't fully understand yet. And every single time, it worked out better than if I had just stayed where it was comfortable.

The weird winding path isn't a liability. It's the point.

Do you know what newspapers, tractors, tuxedos and clean energy all have in common?

They all needed someone who could learn the space, find the people, understand the real story, and build something worth paying attention to.

That is literally my job. The industry is just context.

If your path looks nothing like anyone else's... good. Stay in it. Say yes before you know all the answers. Figure it out as you go. Be honest when you don't know something and equally honest about how you'll learn it.

The weird path might just be your superpower.

It was mine.