002- What do you want to be when you grow up?

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I sat down 3 or 4 times to write this, and it ended up sounding like an obituary. Or it sounded like I was trying to do wayyyy too many jobs. My life sounds really disorganized, but I promise you it’s not. I have a confession to make... sometimes I think that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Am I the only one that feels this way? I’m just going to tell you about all the different jobs I’ve had.

FARM WIFE- I’ve always been the Financial Manager of our dairy and cattle business. I grew up on a beef ranch. My family has always been involved with agriculture… my paternal side goes back several generations as farmers or ranchers. Growing up, I used to think I’d never want to be involved with ranching. I didn’t think it was cool that we lived out of town, on a ranch, when all my friends lived in town. I didn’t think it was cool that my sister and I had to help my dad with the cattle in the summertime when my friends in town were doing fun things. My dad is famous for saying, “People would pay money to do what you girls get to do.” Insert eyeroll. At the time, we didn’t have much appreciation for what he said or what we “got” to do for free. I spent my growing up years living on what was a working cattle ranch…. It is now the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge.

My major at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo (the OG Cal Poly!) was Agricultural Business, concentrating on Finance. I still can’t really tell you why I chose that as my major, but I loved it once I got started. Once I got out of Humboldt County, I was amazed and intrigued by California Agriculture. I graduated with Bachelors Degrees in in 1997. After college, I worked for American AgCredit, Six Rivers Bank and Renner Petroleum, before having kids.

We were in the beef business for 13 years and started our dairy in 2016. I like knowing that we are producing a healthy product. And while I am not out in the field managing the day-to-day operations, I do most of the behind the scenes things….. financial management, bookkeeping, dealing with lenders, human resources, etc. I also was appointed by the Governor to the California Beef Council in 2014.

PHOTOGRAPHER- I’d always loved photography, and since I had little kids, I took a lot of pictures. Like a ridiculous amount. I started taking pictures for friends and family, and things starting moving towards making it into a business. I spent a huge amount of time online learning as much about photography as I could. Other than going to some workshops, I am completely self-taught. In 2009, I officially started a small photography business. Over the next couple of years, I photographed a few weddings, but mostly kids’ portraits. I even got into doing school portrait photography, which is a whole different ball game. For a couple years, in the fall, I was photographing 1500 students and staff in a 4 week period. Whew! Makes me worn out just thinking about it! I did get really burnt out and decided to close my business. My favorite thing about the photography business is to be able do portrait sessions, at no charge, for someone wouldn’t otherwise get one…. for financial or other reasons. I got a lot of personal satisfaction from doing that.

REALTOR- Because I didn’t have enough going on in my life, I decided to become a Realtor at the beginning of 2014. I had quite a bit of experience with buying and selling houses from a client’s perspective. We used to “flip” houses before flipping was so popular. And some of the properties we bought, we kept and turned them into rentals. We had a property manager for our rentals and I would highly recommend that anyone who has rentals uses one. Back to being a Realtor…. I was able to get my California Broker’s License during this time. However, I just didn’t love it. I wasn’t for me. I did, however, keep my Broker’s License active.

SCHEDULING MANAGER- At the end of 2015, I took a job with a local construction company, DCI Builders. I was there for a little over two years. I managed the scheduling of all the construction jobs and I loved it. However, an opportunity kind of fell in our laps at the end of 2017. We found out the property manager that managed our rentals was retiring and selling her business. We decided to purchase that and that I would manage the daily operations of that office.

PROPERTY MANAGER- on January 2, 2018, I took over as the new Broker/Owner of Six Rivers Property Management. I have an awesome staff and I’ve been here for over 5 years. We leased and moved to a new office building in May 2021. It’s been a great change for our office. I will share some of the things that happen in my daily property management life a little later.

Have a great day. Make Yourself Proud!