The path to the top ranks wasn’t always smooth, Cavanaugh suggested during a telephone interview. A company she worked with in the early years succumbed to the Great Recession of 2008, yielding some hard lessons along the way.
“In my earlier years it was all about the stability and the comfort zone,” she acknowledged. “When the crash hit and I had to close a company down and I had to lay off people I cared deeply about, it humbled me in a way I’ve held on to ever since. And it also taught me that nothing is ever certain.”
That truth – as tough a pill to swallow as it might be – actually had an empowering effect, Cavanaugh suggested. “There’s a saying that it’s not the strongest that survive but those most adaptable to change. I started to learn how to adapt to changes that would come in life and business in the course of the years that followed. All of sudden when you’re not afraid of change anymore and you believe you can overcome everything that comes at you, you start to have some really cool, creative ideas and you start to think bigger. When you think bigger and you’re not afraid and know that if you fall you’re going to get up again, it changes everything.”
Pivoting into an epiphany
That was the defining moment: “That is truly what pivoted me from what I would call a manager into a leader, an employee into an entrepreneur. That was really the moment, but I wouldn’t know that for many years until the opportunity presented itself to me.”
That opportunity came in 2014. By then she was four years into a post-closing government insuring manager’s role at Prospect Mortgage LLC after having run the foreclosure division for Bank of America. Her old business partner, Brad Rice, approached her about rejoining him in a new venture – Amerifund Home Loans.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.