I am the director of strategy on Lument’s business transformation team and work out of the New York office. My team focuses on driving Lument’s initiatives and invigorating how we operate. I also manage a multinational team of engineers and developers that supports loan servicing and asset management at the company.
My career in finance began at Merrill Lynch, where I split my time between working on the credit side of real estate debt and equity financing and assisting lawyers in asset recovery. I was putting in such crazy hours that my supervisors eventually insisted that I choose just one area to specialize in. I went with commercial real estate because the transactions seemed more real to me. Later, a former colleague suggested that I leave management consulting to join Hunt Real Estate Capital, one of Lument’s legacy companies, and that’s how my career at Lument began.
On the business transformation team, our goal is to make Lument’s work processes more efficient and effective. I want to make sure we are operating with the latest technology and all the available cutting-edge tools as we help leadership execute their long-term and strategic goals. For example, when Hunt, Lancaster Pollard, and RED Capital were unified under the Lument banner, I helped ensure that we could leverage our respective strengths to take the newly integrated company to the next level.
As a leader, I’m big on communication. This means being good at both talking and listening, as well as being open to and internalizing feedback. The next step I take is to patiently synthesize all the information I receive and use it to improve performance and make my team better. This translates into everything, allowing me to really connect with people—across all levels and on the other side of the negotiating table—be they a vendor, client, or an account manager.
One interesting thing about me is that I can read some radiographic film, like chest X-rays, and can sometimes tell if they show certain conditions such as COPD with emphysema. I picked this up at an administrative job in the radiology department at my alma mater’s university teaching hospital. I hung around the radiologists for long enough during resident teaching sessions to pick up some of what they were reading and detecting. A couple of physicians even tried to get me to take the MCAT and consider a career in medicine. However, I sometimes get queasy around surgical tools and blood, so I decided to stick with my accounting and finance majors.
