From Nashville to Brisbane: Finding My Place in a City I Love

I’m originally from Nashville, Tennessee.

My Australian story started when I came to Melbourne on a university exchange. I loved the experience — and I also met a guy.

I went back home to the US to finish my studies, but we stayed in touch. Then in 2013, I decided to return to Australia on a working holiday visa. We reconnected, got married and Australia became home.

Being from Nashville “The Music City”, there was naturally some music industry work involved, but I also worked in hospitality and retail. Like most young people, I was doing whatever jobs I landed and figuring things out as I went along.

When I moved back to Australia, I found a job with a booking agency in Melbourne, organising DJs and bands for events, festivals and gigs.

A large chunk of my time was really spent talking to people. I directly worked with the clients booking the artists, understanding what they wanted and making sure everything came together.

Looking back, that has been the common thread throughout my career. My jobs have almost always been customer-facing in one form or another.

After the booking agency, I moved into student recruitment at a small music and arts college in Melbourne. I loved it. It was creative, interesting and a great place to work.

And student recruitment is sales. Nobody in education calls it sales, but it absolutely is. You have targets, you’re talking to prospective students, and you’re trying to convince them that your institution is the right place for them.

Then Covid happened.

Things in Melbourne were not fun and my husband and I were craving a sunshine-change! We had been to Brisbane a few times and liked it. So, in 2021, we decided to apply for jobs up here. We both very quickly got jobs and, without much planning, we looked at each other and said “we better pack and go”.

My first role in Brisbane was with the University of Queensland. I ran their contact centre and international offer conversions team, which meant encouraging students who had offers to actually enrol - definitely sales!

By then, I’d spent many years dealing with clients and students, and I started to notice something.

I seemed to have a knack for understanding how customers experienced an organisation.

I’d sit in meetings and hear conversations about processes or decisions from the organisation’s point of view, and I could immediately see how different the customer lens is.

I found myself explaining that customer perspective to people. Eventually, I realised there might actually be a business in it.

So, I started doing consulting on the side.

One of those jobs was Coles. After doing a project for them, they offered me a full-time role.

It was one of those offers where you think, “It would probably be fairly stupid to turn this down.” It was a fantastic opportunity. And I was still doing consulting whenever I could.

But there was one fairly significant problem. It required constant - an exhausting - trips to Melbourne.

Big companies are always restructuring. When another round of restructure came up, I took the opportunity and accepted their offer for a redundancy.

It turned out to be the push I needed.

I contacted people in my network, let them know I was going into consulting full-time and started putting the foundations of my business in place.

It has been great. And challenging in equal measure.

A lot of my professional network is still in Melbourne because that’s where I spent so much of my career. It’s no surprise I still have clients there, which is great.

But Brisbane is home now and I’m growing my network and my business with a local focus. I am an absolute Brisbane fangirl.

When I’m not working, you can find me walking around Mt Cootha or hosting trivia nights at The Ox - I love Trivia!