It is an honor to be serving you as the Executive Director of the Westfield Area Chamber of Commerce. I would like to get to meet all of you at some point. Please feel free to call me to discuss any ideas you might have to help the chamber serve you better. So that you have a better understanding of who I am, let me tell you a little about how I got here.
You know how some people are born to be business owners? That’s me. From the age of 10 I knew I would be entrepreneurial my entire life. Over the years I started and sold several businesses whose clients included national organizations such as Minolta, IBM, Volkswagen, The Republican Party, The Democratic National Committee, multiple major medical centers, and a wide variety of small businesses.
In my mid-twenties I started a marketing materials design company, which I ran for 25 years. We developed a unique specialty in political design work. At one point, we became the largest design company in the country for that type of work.
One of the things I was most proud of with that company was that after the first year 100% of our work came from referrals. As unbelievable as that sounds, there literally was no marketing, advertising or proactive selling. During that time my competitors would ask me, “How do you do twice the volume the rest of us do with half the staff? And, can you help me do it?”
As I was explaining things to those that asked for my help, I realized my success in building that business had very little to do with what I knew about design, I’m not a trained designer, but rather what I knew about consciously developing people both on the staff side and client side. That value adding helped them achieve their goals and objectives.
Over the next ten years I’ve helped people, as a business coach, successfully build their lives and businesses into what they really want them to be. I became active in the WACC when I opened a business in Westfield in 2002. Now, I’m looking forward to developing the WACC to serve our members better.
