Ryan Belote, MBA

I think there are a couple of things. First, my dad is an entrepreneur, and growing up, we helped him with his businesses and worked with and for him. He really instilled in us, me and my siblings, a work ethic of having respect for your employees, working hard, and accomplishing the goals that you set out to achieve. He taught us to give our work the diligence it deserves. Beyond that, I think there's also a little bit of luck involved. Timing-wise, I happened to be in a very small town before remote work became common, and that town happened to have a big SaaS company here. They happened to like to hire recent college graduates, and not everyone gets that lucky of an opportunity. If it had been during the remote work era, it probably would have been much more difficult to break in.

The best advice I've received is all about getting to know the folks you're working with and not being afraid to stretch across teams. That's what I always tell new hires: don't be shy to talk to everyone. Don't be afraid to talk to people regardless of title, and kind of reach out beyond maybe your normal comfort level and get to know people. The people you know are going to be a huge part of your career and a huge part of where you go and who you reach out to when you need advice or when you find a hiccup in your career. Whether you're in college and it's your professors and other students, or in your career, networking outside of even your own department and talking to everyone, not just the right people, but everyone, and getting knowledge from all the spaces you can is so important.

I think there's a level of showing up confident, even when you don't feel it, and bringing a voice, even when you're not prompted to bring your voice anyway. I think it's important to be prepared. Oftentimes, thankfully in the role I'm in now, I'm really grateful to be in a room where I am one of many women, but previously I have been in a room where there's 12 men and one woman, and you can let that get to you, or you can just own the seat you're in. I think that's the important thing to do: just come with that confidence, even if the back of your head is nagging at you that it's not there, to show up with it anyway.

The challenges in my position involve being highly encouraging and helping folks on the team see the possibility and believe in what they can do within the customer base. Inspiring something in other people that they may not already see can be challenging. Whether it's getting them to believe in the software and the product so much, and in themselves, while also holding them to a high standard when they aren't performing the way they need to, it's about balancing being very encouraging and showing them what the possibility is so that they're excited to achieve it and it's self-driven, while also letting them know that we need to make some corrections in certain areas. That's always a challenge in management. As for opportunities, it's the same with everyone: how do we use AI to make everyone's job better? The opportunity is how do we make everyone's life easier and help them do the most meaningful work by letting AI do the stuff that's not as meaningful, and let our people do the really meaningful stuff and maybe inspire them more by using that.

I think in all of it, it's doing everything 100%. In work and personal life, I like to say I have no chill. If I'm going to attempt something, whether that's hitting a professional goal or throwing a baby shower for a friend, it's putting in 100% and trying to make that the best that I personally am capable of making it. And then bringing in other people is so important. In my first time being a manager, I said the reason I'm here is just because I talked to the right people that told me the right information to get me here. Other people lifting you up is completely necessary to be anywhere. And of course, another value for me is my faith, which is a big part of everything I do. They say to work for folks like you're working for God, and I try to take that on and put on that lens of how do I work with this with all of me.