Pledge 1%'s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Jaime Brown
Vice President of Operations, Appluent Business Solutions
Phoenixville, PA, USA
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
As the Vice President of Operations, I'm responsible for overseeing the operations team and ensuring Client Success while assisting in company growth.
This year's International Women's Day theme is "Embrace Equity." What does this mean to you? How can we build workplaces that are more equitable and inclusive?
To 'Embrace Equity' is to ensure there are fair opportunities and treatments for all individuals within an Organization. To practice this, you must first be aware that these barriers and advantages do exist. Once you accept and understand that, you can start working towards improving these situations for all individuals.
Do you have any mentors or role models who have helped you on your personal journey?
My family. My family is very hard working, supportive, and encouraging. Everyone is constantly striving to do their best and work hard which has been a great environment to grow up in. The environment they provided has shaped me into who I am today both professionally and personally.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Never stop learning or growing as a person. I always strive to continue to learn and improve on myself. Whether it is learning from failing, learning from other individuals or learning from difficult situations. It is important to stay open minded and find ways to grow and improve in every aspect of your life. Things happen out of our control and the best we can do is take that experience and learn something from it. I do believe everything happens for a reason and part of that is to help us learn and grow.
The past few years have brought many new and unprecedented challenges. What keeps you motivated or inspires you to stay optimistic?
The last few years have been incredibly challenging on everyone. We have experienced situations that we have read about in our history books but I never thought we would experience in our lifetime. Some of the situations we have been handed is out of our control. If it is out of our control, the best we can do is adapt and stay positive. Understand that things and situations change throughout our lives and we need to adapt with that. We can take a moment to be upset or sad about a situation but then we need to adjust and continue on. Life it too short to not be optimistic about the future. To quote Dave Matthews Band "Whatever tears at us, whatever holds us down, and if nothing can be done, we'll make the best of what's around" which I think is a great quote to live by.
Pledge 1% helps companies of all sizes and stages leverage their assets for social good. Why do you think it's important that companies prioritize social impact? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
It is extremely important for companies to incorporate social impact in their organization. Finding time for individuals to help contribute can be difficult in their daily lives but if organizations give their employees the option to contribute all together we are increasing the impact. Our company schedules days throughout the year where we volunteer and donate our time to help local organizations.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Reliable. You can rely on to do what is expected of me in my professional life. You can rely on me to be there for you if you need a friend. And my family can rely on me to be there for them always.
Do you have any unique or useful life hacks to help get through your day?
I wouldn't say it is unique but I personally find it useful. I enjoy incorporating music into my day. It really helps me focus and 'get in the zone' to make my day most productive.
Do you have any go-to apps or tools use love to use?
Being in the technology space, I love apps and tools that make my job responsibilities easier. I regularly use Salesforce, Conga and Slack in my day to day but there is one tool in particular that stands out called FilePulse. FilePulse layers on top of the Salesforce and alerts me when new files or file versions are created. This tool helps keep me in the loop with Sales for large quotes are being generated and when new Statement of Works are executed. I get a notification so I can prepare on the Operations side appropriately for resources. In addition, when a client uploads a new file into our Community for a support case we get a notification to help support them faster. If you use Salesforce, I would definitely recommend looking into this app.
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
I'm excited to start enjoying experiences again such as travel, sporting events and concerts. It has been difficult the last few years with these activities disappearing and I'm going to enjoy the events we took for granted previously. Hopefully we can celebrate another World Series appearance - Go Phillies!
