From the Field to the Boardroom

In the late springs of the early 1980s, my whole family would pile into an old white van. My grandfather drove. My grandmother said a prayer and blessed us all before we pulled out for the two-day drive from San Benito, Texas, to Kaleva, Michigan.

We were going to the fields.

We'd arrive at a dust-filled camp of small houses with one shared set of showers in the middle, and it was rare to get more than a day before the work started. I was one of the youngest, so my jobs were the lighter ones, but I never once felt like I had it easy. What I saw in those fields, and the way people treated us when we went into town, stayed with me long after we drove home.

For years, whenever I'd hear someone complain about a simple task at work, I couldn't help but think they'd just never had the chance to learn what hard actually was. I had. I didn't love school either, but my mom had a way of reminding me that if I didn't take it seriously, the fields would be waiting for the rest of my life. That was all the motivation I needed.

So I got my education. And then, like a lot of people in their early twenties, I spent a few years not doing much with it. I bartended. It was fun, it paid, and it quietly pulled me away from any real plan. At twenty-three I looked up and realized I didn't want to still be doing this at thirty. I took what I thought was a short-term job, answering support calls at a call center, just to help cover tuition.

That "short-term job" turned into everything.

I was good at it, and I got promoted. Then recruited. I went from answering dial-up internet support calls at DISH Network to running special projects for some of the largest call centers in the country at T-Mobile, earning my MBA along the way. I'd turned a headset into a career.

There was a line my grandfather lived by, and I carried it into every one of those rooms: if you're going to do something, learn to do it well, then make it easier for the next person to follow. He never sat me down and lectured me with it. I just watched him give every task, and every person, 100 percent, and somewhere along the way it became the thing I said to myself.

That mindset took me places I never pictured from the fields. My company sent me and my family overseas for two years and handed me the worst-performing site in the network, ranked 25th in the world. We didn't turn it around by importing American answers. We did it by making it safe for people to admit what they didn't know yet, and fixing it together. In twelve months, it was number one. Later, I led digital care for more than 4,000 people across two major carriers, and we earned back-to-back J.D. Power awards, not by squeezing people but by taking care of them and hitting the numbers at the same time. Today I lead rentals customer support and business operations at Zillow. Still in the arena. Still learning.

But the part I'm proudest of doesn't show up on a résumé.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, my wife and I started REVJLO, a nonprofit back home in South Texas that's helped keep kids on track and get them to college when their parents couldn't swing it. Giving back stopped being something I did on the side and became the whole point. I've spent time lifting up the people coming behind me, because you can't be what you can't see, and I want the next kid from a place like mine to see it.

Here's what all of it taught me, and what I spend my time on now.

Nobody handed me a path. My dad built with his hands. My mom built a business out of nothing. I built a career from a headset. Leadership was never something I was born into. It was something I built, one deliberate choice at a time, getting plenty of it wrong along the way. Built, not born.

And the whole climb proved something the working world still gets wrong: you don't have to choose between hitting your numbers and taking care of your people. Fear gets you a quarter. Trust gets you a team. Every result I'm actually proud of came from refusing that trade-off.

So when I say from the field to the boardroom, I don't mean it as a brag. I mean it as proof, for you. If you're standing somewhere near where I started, wondering whether the room you want is even open to you: it's buildable. You can learn to do the work well. And when you get where you're going, you can turn around and make it easier for the next person to follow.

That's the whole idea. It's my turn to do that at scale.

Yours is coming.