" MBA MUST "

Take a step back a bit now. I was working in IT. IT is sporadic in hours. Sometimes, you hit 60 hr weeks and sometimes less. I went from a help desk position early in 1993 to Senior System Engineer years later. With all the time I was putting in with College students, I had very little time to think about career development. There were many weeks when my hours at work and with college students would both kick up so much that I could count the hours of sleep I had on my two hands.

I know I should have put more thought into my career. My vision of where I wanted to be in the 5 yr , 10yr picture always had College students tainting my own personal goals. So I was only thinking about positions that could allow me to work and have time for College students.

I continued to do what I could at work to just get by in terms of knowledge at my job. This meant studying for computer certifications left and right when I could find spare minutes here and there. I studied during lunches, dinners while waiting for students to show up for appointments, even in the bathroom. I know that sounds vulgar, but I was seeking every spare minute to get the most done.

On top of all this, I was still dating my current wife. We had our ups and downs, but that took quite a bit of time as well.

All this time with college students and my work life changed 3 years ago when I got married. I started to realize that continuing with College students was leaving me empty. I was starting to think about what the core of my passions and gifting really were. I was always enterprising, strong in administration skills, strategizing, vision casting, creating new divisions of the College group to address different needs and recruiting students for different tasks and projects. I did this really well to be honest.

The decisions to be made became clearer as I began to realize that I was being called to go with one of the pastors to start a Church in Silicon Valley 6 months after I got married. I felt the conditions were leading me to do it. So my wife and I left all our closest friends and her family to start this Church. I ran Operations, Finances and provided organizational structure management to the new initiative. But I wasn’t getting paid. I would work 40-60 hr weeks and I was starting to wonder about my career and my financial status. When you get married, money matters a lot more. Not in the sense of wanting to be rich, but more in the area of having enough to know that you can take care of the costs coming in and do some occasional fun things. The Church is now over 500 and is the fastest growing Church on the West Coast for our denomination which has over 3000 Churches. Once again, I see my leadership helping to grow organizations. Although… let’s be honest. God has a say you know!

As I contemplated my future this last 3 years since moving to Silicon Valley, I started to reflect on my years working with college student and how my IT career advanced so little because I didn’t try that hard. (I kept looking for jobs that were stable and would give me time to work with students at night or be flexible to do lunches with students)

Reflectively, I saw Executive leadership as something that I loved and was good at. Starting from scratch or building something up from nothing and knowing how to change the infrastructure of the organization to accommodate growth and prevent stagnation due the decision making bottlenecks and to invest into people to get to those levels.

A couple of examples that show what I’m talking about were jobs where I was tasked to build consulting branches of IT companies that previously didn’t exist or to bring in more business. At one company, the gross sales in the first year alone exceeded 3 million dollars. Another company I went to had me initially managing 5 different companies IT departments. Dozens of introductory meetings with new companies later, it turned into 24 companies who depended on my being available to strategize with each company on IT utilization within defined budgets and support of existing IT resources. I would do some of the work, or I would bring in others from my company to help get the work done in a timely fashion. Eventually, when I left the company, 7 of those companies followed me and I ended up supporting them on the side.

Ok, so now back to my situation in Silicon Valley. After about a year, I stopped working at the Church to take a job bringing in money. I was starting to get paid from the Church, but due to other reasons, I decided to pass the baton on to someone else of what I was responsible for and enter the IT workforce again. From that point till now, I’ve taken on numerous contracts because the job market here has really sucked so contracts were the best you could get if you were new to the area. But in the last 6 months was when I decided to stick my neck out and take action on a business school possibility. 

So you see, infrastructure, business, leadership, customer service, organizational change, mentoring… these are all things I’ve learned how to do and do better over time. It just makes sense to get the MBA and it seems that the decision to go get it is a natural step in my career growth. 


 

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