Maggie Beas

I attribute my success to taking chances, listening, critical thinking, and analyzing. A huge part of it is process improvement and training teams, which includes being able to step out of your comfort zone and saying, let's just try this one thing, it might just work. It might just make everybody's life easier. It might make your job going from working on a project for 4 hours to working on a project for 2 hours. Being able to guide the team through that is so important, because sometimes it's difficult when people want to stick to what they know. But when you explore and try new things, you realize all this time we could have done this easier, we could have spent less time spinning our wheels. That's what has made the difference for me.

About 8 or 9 years ago, I had a mentor who was my biggest cheerleader and my biggest advocate. He taught me that a people leader who serves is so much more stronger than a people leader who uses authority or an authoritative demeanor. A serving leader gets more results than an authoritative leader that says get it done, get it done before end of day. The servant leader says, hey, we've got this deadline, it's end of day, let me know what you need to get it done before end of day. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar. Being a servant leader and being in the trenches and rolling up your sleeves has a lot to do with your staff going above and beyond and making it happen, at whatever cost, all the time. Because you've instilled this behavior of a servant leader, they look at you different. They'll say, what can I do for you? What do you need from me? Boss, is there anything I can help with? They're done with what they've got and they step it up and they step in. That just makes your life a lot easier than running a dictatorship.

Believe in yourself. Trust your gut instinct. Go for it. Apply. Bump up your resume. Don't be shy to say what all you know, because hoarding knowledge is not going to get you recognized. It's the sharing, it's the sharing what you know with other key people that matters. I always say that you must always hire somebody that's smarter than you, somebody that knows something different than what you know, because in combination, you make like 100 years experience. That's the approach you need to take.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is the workforce getting easily distracted in the world we live in today, with social media and anything that has a negative impact on their work. Another major challenge is pay. Employers want the experience, but they don't necessarily want to pay the employees for what they know. There are capped salaries and capped brackets. You've got team members coming in with 10, 15 years experience who are phenomenal, and they get paid the same as somebody with an entry level knowledge base. On the opportunity side, the biggest opportunity in revenue right now is maximizing AI functionality. If we can focus on AI functionality, it doesn't mean cutting out the human, it just means maximizing a human's time. For example, a report that normally takes you 6 hours would take you 3, cut in half, if we know how to use AI accordingly and properly. I think that most of the companies that are running revenue businesses are all leaning towards AI to be the mastermind of what all we do.

You've got to be yourself. You've got to be true to what you're doing. You've got to love what you're doing, otherwise it becomes just a 9-to-5 job. Not being mediocre, I guess, is my biggest attribute in value. When you do something, you do it right. You do it all the way. That's what matters most to me.