Dare Mighty Things. TM Smith
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 a lane that worked for her and then set about making that ambiguity a strength she could leverage. And most of all she had fun doing it.
THE ACTOR
When the image of the actor persona appears in your head, you should just go ahead and picture Melissa. Of all the people I met, Melissa was the person who most clearly understood the value and opportunity that this role provided, along with the various pitfalls it presented to someone who was not careful. In her time at Quicken and later as the founder of dPOP! Melissa was able to walk that fine line of demonstrating the confidence and integrity to accept new responsibilities with very little experience. She balanced the idea of faking it, while also relying on her ability to understand the vision and the expected end result.
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