Building Where No One Else is Looking

I’m a nerd and I love to work. Challenges are good for me and help me get stronger, smarter and more vulnerable. I have always been drawn to the places other people overlook and I have had many life experiences that most other people have not. I learned a saying “find a need and fill it” that stuck in my head like an earworm.

Maybe that has been the thread running through all of my career and life — the markets, the companies, the opportunities, even the people. I have never been particularly interested in following the crowd. I am usually looking in the opposite direction, asking what everyone else is missing. That instinct has shaped my career, and it has also shaped the way I move through the world. Curiosity became one of the most important tools I ever had.

My career did not begin with a carefully designed plan. I had spent five years as a stay-at-home mother, and when my oldest child started school, I was ready to go back to work. I wanted to both be a mom and have a career. The career world was calling, and I wanted to answer.

My experience up until then was in retail and I was interested in finding a new pathway – a stronger career that I could grow into.   I needed something I would be able to enter without a college degree. I had married young and set aside my university years for motherhood and went back to get my degree in Finance, years later.

A mentor/friend of mine suggested becoming a stockbroker which was basically a “sales” job which I already had experience in. I would need to get licensed, and would be able to secure a job sans college degree. One of my friends from high school’s father worked at a brokerage firm, so I reached back into that connection. He agreed to sponsor me for my exam. I found an intensive two-week course, studied for my Series 7, passed it, put on my newly purchased suit, and started looking for a job. I had 12 interviews, four offers and picked the best one.

It was the 1980s, and brokerage firms had hiring quotas for women. That opened the door, and I was super excited to enter this complex world of markets and finance. I joined a group of seven people — two experienced brokers and five rookies — operating almost like a small firm inside a larger one. As a rookie, I was handed the accounts nobody else wanted: Dead accounts. Lists of people who had purchased penny stocks, including mining stocks that had declined in value. Most brokers avoided them; I loved them.

The people behind those accounts with gold mining stocks fascinated me. They were contrarians. They understood economics and cycles. They would ask me questions about companies they still owned, and instead of pretending I knew the answer, I would tell them, “I’ll look into it and call you back.”

This was before email. Before information was instantly available. A callback meant something. So, I started calling the mining companies directly. I would call the President or the CEO and ask my questions. And they answered. They took my calls, because nobody else was calling them. I asked the questions the investors had asked me and then I called the investors back to report to them. I won on BOTH sides.  I had found my opening.

Within a few years, I became one of the top brokers in the United States specializing in mining stocks. I found a niche in the bottom of a market, which is actually the perfect time to build expertise. I was hungry and I wanted to excel at what I did.  I wanted to be the “people’s broker” and understand what I was recommending to them – and of course for them to make money with those investments!

I built a network of mining executives, geologists, mining engineers and mining analysts and it was clear I was on a path to become an analyst myself.  I studied the textbooks my executive buddies lent me, went on mine tours and asked a million questions, befriended any mining analyst who would talk to me, and I learned the business. I became a self-taught mining analyst. I wrote columns. I attended and spoke at mining conferences. I built a stellar rolodex of contacts and surrounded myself with people who understood the industry. I showed up, I listened and I acted. It was scary at times because I was a newbie and when my head would get full of those negative thoughts, I used my mentors to vent my insecurities which they turned around and helped me to build confidence to keep going.

I also learned something important watching the brokers around me. Most of them were generalists chasing commissions. I wanted to be different. I wanted to actually help people understand what they owned and build wealth. I believed if I became truly knowledgeable in one area, the right clients would find me.

At the same time, I was an anomaly. I was often the only woman in the room, and I liked it. I liked being different and standing out. One of my buddies told me at a conference “You have a unique opportunity here as the only woman – take advantage of it.  Doors are opening for you compared to me.  I am competing against 12 other guys with the same degrees and ambitions.  You don’t have that, so go through the doors – pay attention and take in as much info as you can and meet as many people as you can in the industry.”  He was right – it was an advantage being a woman in the all-male world of finance and mining.  And lots of people liked me and I liked them – we were having fun!

A lot of the men in the industry became like big brothers to me. They helped me, challenged me, and brought me along. I earned their trust, and they earned mine. Behind closed doors, many of them shared things with me they would never say publicly. There was a level of trust they had in me that shaped how I understood leadership and relationships.

A couple of years into my brokerage career, I went to the Northwest Mining Association conference in Spokane, WA, - I was the only woman registered among 600 mining and finance guys.  I came home with a stack of business cards and a ton of new contacts. I put them on my desk and thought, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this, but someday it’s going to be something.” Two years later, it became something. I founded a trade association for the gold mining companies called the Denver Gold Group.

As I built my investment book of clients who loved gold, I met as many gold mining companies as possible, meaning I had to go to Canada where most of them were publicly traded. I had been spending a lot of time in Vancouver, where many of the mining companies were based, and I noticed a major difference between the Canadian and American companies. The Canadians were raising capital because they knew how to promote themselves. They had beautiful materials, strong presentations, and compelling stories. The American companies had assets, but they were handing investors dog-eared annual reports with coffee stains on them. The problem was not quality, it was communication.

That observation eventually became the foundation for the Denver Gold Group. The idea was simple: companies could accomplish more together than they could individually. A small band of mining guys were there to encourage and support this idea. We formed the organization in 1988 and held our first conference in Denver in 1989. We had 625 attendees, about twenty exhibitor booths, and two full days of programming. I organized the whole thing myself whilst running my brokerage business and being a busy Mom. Looking back, it was crazy. It taught me that it was time to hire some help.  This was not a one-person job. It also became apparent to me, that running the Denver Gold Group needed to become my full time job and I would need to walk away from being a mining analyst and broker. It was a process.

For years, I built that organization while still working as a stockbroker and raising two children as a single mother. I did not draw a paycheck from the organization for a long time. I carried checks in my purse waiting until there was enough money to cash them. It took years before the model truly clicked.

In the fifth year, we found the magic. We shifted the focus toward institutional investors, the major gold companies decided to takt a chance and show up along with their largest institutional investors and bankers, and everything changed. The Denver Gold Group became a respected platform in the industry. We were the buzz in the gold market for the first time.

During those years, I learned how to compartmentalize. I had been a single mother in a demanding business, and I was used to doing what needed to be done. The culture then was different. It was the era of “dress for success.” You wore the suit. You showed up. You didn’t let them see you sweat. It was working for me and I was in my element – running with the big dogs. I had a few run ins with men who didn’t like me and women who saw me as competition and stabbed me in the back.  I managed to navigate through it all with my close family ties and friends who helped support me and cheer me on.

And while I was building something very public, my personal life was carrying something much bigger. In 1998 my daughter Dani was diagnosed with cancer when she was eighteen. Dani was my wild child. She pushed the envelope and sometimes my last nerve. She had tattoos and piercings and changed her hair because she was always exploring who she was and who she wanted to become. She never knew a stranger. She was taking college classes while still in high school and making the Dean’s List. She wanted to become a famous fashion designer.

When she was diagnosed, she told me, “Mom, I am not dying of cancer. I am living with it.” And she did. She got an apartment. She got a job. She continued school and went to her senior prom. We travelled, shared meals, and went through treatments. We laughed a lot, and we cried too. She had sixteen months living with cancer, and she lived more in her nineteen years on this planet than many people do in forty. Dani taught me how to be present, how to ask for what you want, how to love deeply, and how to stand up for yourself. She once told me, “Mom, we were picked for a reason.” I carry that with me.

The people around me during that time showed me something about connection. I had a strong personal relationship with a man who became my second husband and he was my biggest supporter. He knew what we were going through because he lost his sister to cancer when he was younger. He was there for me and for my children in one of the most difficult times of our lives. People in the industry supported me in ways I will never forget. There were acts of kindness that allowed us to create memories as a family.

For years afterward, I honoured Dani through a foundation I formed, supporting research for the type of cancer she had. It was part of bringing my whole life together instead of keeping every piece separate. I faced a challenge bigger than could be expected in losing my daughter. My grief was a driver and it changed me in ways that made me much stronger through my vulnerability.  I was shedding the stereotype of not letting people see me sweat or cry or be myself.  It was eventually time to step out on my own.

Eventually, after building the Denver Gold Group for 18 years, I reached a point where I knew it was time for something different. Leaving the association as their full-time CEO and start a new venture, was incredibly hard because I put in 18 years of my life and considered it my baby. I had built it like it was my own business.

Two major things happened to catapult me. It was 2005, and I got a call from one of our members, Rob McEwen, CEO of then US Gold (now McEwen Mining) offering me a board seat.  I said “Yes!”  It was a new beginning for me and I was being recognized as a successful mining executive in the industry. At the same time, I had been asked to produce the same institutional conference for the Oil & Gas industry by a very powerful merchant banker in Canada who told me he would back it.  The timing was perfect, so I launched my own company to start new institutional investor resources conferences for mining and oil & gas around the world.

My conferences were a huge success, and the first year’s revenues were over $2M with three of us working from my basement. I travelled 120 days a year, meeting with bankers, doing investor conferences in Africa, the Middle East and North America. It was fun to repurpose the model I built for Denver Gold and apply it to new resources and geographies around the world.  That big leap to go out on my own was super scary at first, and when it caught on – it was a hockey stick event for me financially, intellectually and business wise. I built my reputation at the Denver Gold Group and expanded it with new conferences and resource sectors that excited me and were underpromoted to investors.

For eight years, I ran hard before reaching a point where I knew it was time again to make a change. The markets were shifting, and I was tired. By that point I had organized hundreds of conferences and thousands of meetings. I had been asked to join more boards and realized I loved doing that work too. My body, mind and personal life needed a break.  I also had the non-profit in my daughters name and we had raised over $1M by then and funded research projects to get new treatments into clinical trials. It was time to roll that back too.  Another shift was coming – I could feel it.

I took a sabbatical for the first time in my working life – 6 months off. No one told me that closing a business (even for all the right reasons) would be a grieving process.  I felt like I was walking around in cement boots.  I was depressed, sad and a bit lost during that time.   I knew I could start another business if I wanted to and decided it was time to write a book about money and how to become debt free and invest. That was on my plate and I also started a financial coaching business.  Soon, I was offered a few jobs and I thought “Well, Id like someone else to be responsible for overhead, payroll, etc.”. and decided to take a role as an Executive Coach.

For the next two years, I worked as a consultant, served on boards, did some financial coaching and began thinking about the next chapter. I had watched my male counterparts climb the corporate ladder, join multiple boards, and transition into that next stage of influence. I thought maybe that was what I would do too.

Then I started hearing the conversation about women not being represented on boards. I began asking women a simple question: “Why aren’t you on a board?” and their answers changed everything. I interviewed hundreds of women, and I realized the preparation and support systems were not where they needed to be. I became frustrated enough that I knew I had to do something.

In 2017, I changed everything again. I formed a new company ACE LLC, built a website, created a board training program, launched my first event, and started what became ACE Board Certification Programs for Women. But before I could teach women, I had work to do myself and my relationship to women in business. They had not been my friends or supporters and I didn’t trust them. I knew I had to change that inside of me.

Most of my career had been spent surrounded by men. They had been my mentors, my sponsors, my network. My experiences with women in business had sometimes been complicated, and I realized I could not stand in front of a room of women asking them to trust each other if I had not done that work myself. I had to let go and be willing to share everything I had learned.

For most of my career, knowledge was power because people protected it. I decided to do the opposite. I started telling women the things nobody was telling them. The unwritten rules. The expectations, the conversations happening behind closed doors; that became one of the most fulfilling shifts of my life – transitioning from the focus on ‘me to thee’. I created a program designed for women and also a certification for boards to eliminate as many barriers to entry as possible.  I have become a promoter, trainer, mentor, recruiter and champion for women getting on boards ever since that day when I asked myself “Why aren’t there more women on boards?”. My goal is to train 1,000 women for boards and through all of my trainings since 2017, hundreds of women have been trained and certified and qualified to be on corporate boards.  They have filled hundreds of board seats and are making a difference.

Today, I get more excited watching another woman step onto a board than I do about my own accomplishments. I love helping someone recognize what they have already built and understand the value they bring. Our ACE Board Grads have become a powerhouse community of women business leaders in every sector of industry.  We have access to experts in almost every field imaginable and can create teams of executives for boards and corporations through our connections. The ACE Board trainings have become more than filling board seats – its filling life dreams and utilizing decades of experience not realized before.  It is uncovering a great treasure of gems to be shared with the world.

When people ask about my greatest accomplishment, it is actually a hard question for me. I have built successful organizations, produced global events, and created things that did not exist before. I want to keep doing that – so I guess my biggest accomplishment, is my on-going desire to live my life to the fullest every day.

I am still curious. Still looking ahead. Still asking what comes next. I believe the future will belong to people who stay connected to humanity. Technology will keep changing everything around us, but relationships, trust, and real conversations will matter more than ever. The people who are happy will be the ones who remember how important it is to truly connect.

That has always been my way. I look for the place nobody else is looking. I build there.