but I had a real sense that there’s more to my life than what I was doing.”
Her quest for more clarity landed her in Michigan. “I followed a boy from Florida to the suburbs of Detroit, thinking that he might lead me to what I was looking for.” And while the boy didn’t last, what she found soon after she arrived in the suburbs of Detroit changed the trajectory of her life and career in immeasurable ways. She didn’t know what a perfect company Quicken Loans would turn out to be for her high energy and ability to solve problems. She spent the next 10 years or so working through every major part of the organization.
“It’s been an amazing experience. I’m so glad I chose Quicken Loans and the IT project role. It gave me the opportunity to support all areas of the organization. I got to learn from a software standpoint and hardware standpoint what the priorities were and requirements that each area of our business needed. That led to a position of purchasing, which led to legal and contract negotiations for all areas of the business.”
But it wasn’t just the roles that propelled Melissa up the ladder within the male-dominated organization. It was her problem-solving aptitude at every step of the journey. “All these different internal groups kept coming to my team for solutions. Ironically, our group was really the operation behind office operations. Anytime somebody would mess up on something, the leadership would come to me and say, ‘Here, Melissa. Will you go work on this?’ I’m a problem solver, which is fun.” She approached each of these challenges with an entrepreneur mindset. “I remember thinking about the facilities team, and the chance for us to be a strong brand. I saw it as an area that could communicate with the entire organization. We had the opportunity to support the whole organization. We saw the company as our client.”
That mindset prompted Melissa to organize an offsite leadership meeting for her facilities team. “I just asked everyone, ‘What’s your passion? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ That was when we began to think about how we could look at our group as a brand. We were starting down a path of acting as our own company within a company.”
Energized with this new approach, her team was ready to rock when Quicken Loan’s chairman, Dan Gilbert announced Melissa was being tapped to take the lead on the logistics for a big move downtown. This undertaking set the stage for Melissa to shine. It was around 2009 when Gilbert and Quicken Loans began making a tremendous investment in the city of Detroit. The city and region were going through a very public struggle as the world witnessed it deal with automotive bailouts, the region’s economic collapse and the pending bankruptcy the City of Detroit was facing. But when others were running away from the challenge, Quicken Loans saw opportunity.
The glare of the spotlight
There was a plan being developed for Quicken Loans to build or lease a massive amount of commercial space and initially move 1,700 of its team members downtown from the suburbs. Melissa was tapped to be one of the key leaders to help make that happen. “There was this huge spotlight on the organization. And I positively took on a huge amount of personal pressure in the sense that I did not want to fuck this up. It was my first major headquarters move, and my first major build-out of any kind,” she explained.
“We had renovated a kitchen here or there before that, but I had no technical training in something like this. I have no design background. I have no facilities background. Most people looking in would go, ‘What business do you have letting her take on this project?’”
But that just served to motivate her and provide the fuel she needed to get it done in the only way she knew how. With confidence and a willingness to fail. But she didn’t fail. Her move of the 1,700 people was considered a huge success. After the success of that move, her team went beyond the logistics of moving people, and became more focused on a turn-key philosophy, helping design and plan entire office spaces.
Soon it expanded beyond simply moving Quicken Loans team members and office furniture. Before long, outside companies moving into Quicken Loans-owned buildings were requesting Melissa’s team to help with space design while infusing the dynamic energy and cultural mood. It became a natural extension that she would provide visually exciting solutions to the new companies coming downtown. That extension led to an expertise and appreciation of the complexity of what they were doing.
Challenge accepted!
“At one point we just realized, holy shit, we’re actually pretty good at this,” Melissa laughed. Soon companies outside of Detroit began to seek out her uncanny skills to do what others couldn’t do. “Companies who were thinking about moving into spaces in Cleveland would ask if they could sit down and brainstorm their move. They saw we moved wicked fast, that we were, hands down, one of the best move teams ever.”
Melissa thrived on every new challenge, and the pressure of the seemingly impossible. Whenever she was presented with something that looked so outlandish to be silly, she would step up and accept the dare. “I think our fastest move was 1,100 people in less than four hours,” she said with a gleam in her eyes. “That move was three different companies into one single destination. For me, it was the challenge of the puzzle.”
But with more projects under her belt and solving all of these problems, it became more and more difficult to challenge Melissa and her internal team. “We had so many moves downtown by this point. It was starting to become old hat. I was starting to get bored. And we’re trying to figure out, ‘How do we elevate this to the next level?’
“It was a very interesting time where I challenged the team. I thought, we were really good, but we can become really great. It was after a visit to Disney’s Institute when I thought, ‘We already do all this. Culture? Got it. Customer service? Got it. We can crush this. We have something super special here. Let’s keep going after it.’”
That something was to transition from being an internal support team for Quicken Loans to a free-standing profit center that would learn to exist and live outside the protective bubble they had enjoyed. Melissa approached Jennifer Gilbert, who is an interior designer and entreprenuer by trade. “I just said, let’s go see if we can. We ran the pro forma in the beginning of 2013. And then several months later we started a business.”
With Jennifer’s interior design experience and contacts and Melissa’s facilities, logistics and overall vision, the team was up and running! The start of that business became known as dPOP. All of the people who were on the team within Melissa’s department made the move to the new firm, and it took all of them to bring the vision to life.
Today, dPOP is a highly successful free-standing business and member of the Quicken Family of Companies with a gross revenue that exceeds $20 million and 30 full-time team members. Melissa says the team is driven to “design inspiring workplaces for culture driven companies,” and have a lot of fun doing it. Which really does prove that having the entreprenurial spirit within an organization and becoming an “intra-preneur” can be just as rewarding.it.
The key personas that Melissa found during her incredible journey included:
THE ADVENTURER
Melissa quite literally carved out and created her own path within the organization she joined very early in her career. What struck me as insightful was the fact that she recognized very early on that one of the keys to her upward mobility was having access to key leaders withinthe organization. The other key element was to accept the role, without it being requested, of being a problem solver. There wasn't a pre-described path for her to follow. There was no organizational chart the had lines connecting project manager to CEO & Founder of an off-shoot, upstart organization. Melissa made her path. She found comfort and success in creating
