arrived. I'm successful. I celebrate that. And like most entrepreneurs, like most successful people, one of the biggest challenges is to stop and celebrate the success. All we're doing is looking at the next day. We get consumed by, you know, that sort of serial entrepreneur."
Melissa Price
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
- Walt Disney
Melissa R. Price
Who: Melissa Price
What: dPOP!
Where: Detroit, Mi
Previous: IT project coordinator, Quicken Loans
dPOPculture.com @dpopculture
"What's your passion? What do you want to be when you grow up? We began to think about how we could look at this [internal company] as a brand. We were starting down a path of acting as our own company within a company."
- Melissa
TL;DR SUMMARY: In 2007 a young woman arrived in Detroit looking for a job. She landed a mid-level position at an established financial company, despite her lack of a college diploma. This is the classic tale of grit, determination and entrepreneurial spirit allowing that young woman to earn a shot at becoming the CEO of a company of her own. The journey really begins more than 30 years ago with this same young girl dreaming of dancing as a featured ballerina on a big stage in New York City. The story takes a detour somewhere in her college years, as she began drifting around, feeling unsure of what she really wanted to do with her life. She moved from Florida to Michigan and found herself making ends meet in the retail world, before she found her home at Quicken Loans. This is how Melissa proved the endless possibilities available to someone who thinks and acts like an entrepreneur from inside a major company.
In 2001 Melissa Price found herselfin Detroit, MI, of all places, after following her boyfriend from her life-long home in Jupiter, Florida. She recently dropped out of college and was drifting a bit, struggling to find her place in the world. She was in a new city, with no college degree, and was in the process of interviewing for a mid-level position at an established financial company in Livonia, MI. To be accurate, she had her eye on two different positions at the company, as she was hedging her bets a bit. Today her title is both innovative and fun, like her career. Her business card announces her as “Keeper of the Vault,” but back in 2001 she was hoping for any job with any title.
“There were two positions available. One was at the help desk, and one was a project coordinator role,” Melissa explained. “They paid the same, the projects were similar, only with the project coordinator role, I would have the opportunity to immediately report to a senior leader. It was one of those decisions that you make in your career that you say to yourself a few years later, ‘Thank God I chose that one.’”
The company Melissa began working for back at the turn of the century as a project coordinator was Quicken Loans. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. The company exploded from 500 team members in 2001 to more than 40,000 today. What is today known as the Quicken Family of Companies is made up of more than 100 different organizations, one of which is dPOP, the commerical interior design and facilities studio Melissa co-founded with Jennifer Gilbert and is now the CEO. This is the story of how taking a risk, being entrepreneurial and daring mighty things can be done inside an organization as well as outside.
Let’s call it being an “intra-preneur.”
Fast-forward to the winter of 2017. Melissa is sitting down with me in a relatively new coffee shop called Dessert Oasis in downtown Detroit. This trendy java joint recently opened in the revitalized Capitol Park District and is thumping on a Monday morning with young business suits strolling in on their way to their jobs downtown. The alternative music is cranked, and most of the people wave to Melissa as she sits down to chat about the meteoric rise of her career. (Not to mention her role that helped the downtown reinvent itself.)
It’s a long journey from Melissa’s early days dreaming of being a principal ballerina as a third-grader. And it is quite the stretch from her later aspirations of saving the world as a brain or heart surgeon when she was a junior in high school. But her place today has everything to do with how her parents gave her the freedom and confidence to explore different options while she was growing up, and instilled in her a work ethic and willingness to make lots of course corrections.
“When I was eight, I wanted to be a ballerina. My dad was very supportive, both my parents were. They really set me up to immerse me in my own dreams. I stayed with it from third grade through my senior year in high school. And it was six to seven days a week of practice,” she explained, as she sipped at her over-sized coffee mug in a corner booth of the coffee joint.
But the ballet career took a hard hit when her hero showed up unexpectedly at her front door. “I had all of my ballet friends over one night and the principal ballerina for Ballet Florida delivered our pizzas,” Melissa said. She remembers feeling dumbfounded, and asking her dad why someone so amazing was delivering pizzas. He explained that those are the sacrifices people sometimes need to make for their passion. Melissa remembers him saying, “That’s what could happen if you’re going to be a ballerina. You’re going to have to have two jobs. And I told him, ‘I don’t want two jobs. Maybe I’m going to be a brain surgeon instead,’” she remembers with a big laugh.
Soon after she decided the better path for her could be as a surgeon. But Melissa’s dad had another wake-up call in store for her. “My dad made me volunteer all summer long at the hospital. He would take me there a few days a week for the whole summer, and I would go in and see what life in a hospital was like. By the end of the summer I was saying, ‘I don’t want to do this, Dad.’
Making small adjustments make a huge impact
“My dad was supportive when it came to my career. He told me that I could do anything I wanted. But at the same time, he showed me that it took hard work, and dedication. I think the creative side of what I do today has definitely been influenced by the fact that I just had such a variety of experiences when I was younger. What I really took away from those years was that small, corrective changes mounted into long-term strengths. These little, tiny adjustments and these little, tiny edits—tweak this and tweak that—just that little adjustment made a huge difference.”
But the idea of being anything she wanted to be was also frustrating because Melissa admits she didn’t have the first idea what she wanted to do after graduating high school. Not having a clear vision pushed her to begin the painful process of figuring it out—the hard way. “As soon as I was 18, I moved out of my parents’ house. I was very independent from day one. So, I went to college for a bit. But for four to five years, I was not really sure where I wanted to go. I ended up doing all kinds of odd jobs while still going to school part-time but never really figured it out.”
Finding the missing piece
Her lack of a definitive direction did not mean lack of ambition or drive. When she’d start a part-time job working retail, it would only be a matter of months before she would find herself solving problems and working her way into an assistant manager role.
