This year, we are celebrating Brenda, our SVP of Sales, for her company anniversary with Chemsearch FE. She has been with the company for 25 years! When Brenda graduated from Oklahoma State University in the early 1990s, she knew two things: 1) she didn’t want to move far from her hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma; 2) she didn’t want to continue working the long hours and days necessary to have a career at the grocery store she had worked at since high school. Luckily, a Chemsearch recruiter found Brenda’s resume at Oklahoma State’s placement office and got in touch regarding a sales position. Brenda’s degree was in marketing, and she never saw herself in a sales role, but she took a chance and hasn’t looked back. By the end of her first year, Brenda was training people in her own territory and had started on a leadership path. By her third year, she was managing a small group of reps in Oklahoma and Kansas, while still maintaining her own sales territory.
Brenda’s career trajectory was skyrocketing, but she decided to continue her half sales/half management position for the next 15 years while her daughter was young. Being a mom, she wanted to be home at night and have some control over her work/family life balance. Brenda says, “Coming from a background of retail, where I worked weekends, holidays, nights, you name it, Chemsearch provided a much better work-life balance. My customers’ schedules were normal, 9 to 5. The day started at a reasonable time, so I was able to drop off my daughter at daycare and pick her up at reasonable time. As she got older, I could balance my schedule so that I was a part of things like school events and soccer practice. I could build my schedule around what I needed to do.”
Now that her daughter is grown, Brenda has been able to focus fully on her career, and her trajectory has not let up. In the early 2000s, Brenda took on a full management position, and a few years later she and her husband moved to Dallas so she could develop her career path in a more corporate setting.
Brenda says FE has provided her with an unlimited opportunity to learn and develop skills related to serving customers and reps. “There’s a constant need and opportunity to learn. You can’t get to the point where you know everything; changes in technology and products happen so fast. There’s a constant need to improve. I don’t want to get complacent or bored in my job, and FE challenges me in a way that other jobs couldn’t.” We are so proud of Brenda and all of her astonishing accomplishments!
