exploded from 500 team members in 2001 to more than 40,000 today. What is today known as the Quicken Family of Companies is made up of more than 100 different organizations, one of which is dPOP, the commerical interior design and facilities studio Melissa co-founded with Jennifer Gilbert and is now the CEO. This is the story of how taking a risk, being entrepreneurial and daring mighty things can be done inside an organization as well as outside.
Let’s call it being an “intra-preneur.”
Fast-forward to the winter of 2017. Melissa is sitting down with me in a relatively new coffee shop called Dessert Oasis in downtown Detroit. This trendy java joint recently opened in the revitalized Capitol Park District and is thumping on a Monday morning with young business suits strolling in on their way to their jobs downtown. The alternative music is cranked, and most of the people wave to Melissa as she sits down to chat about the meteoric rise of her career. (Not to mention her role that helped the downtown reinvent itself.)
It’s a long journey from Melissa’s early days dreaming of being a principal ballerina as a third-grader. And it is quite the stretch from her later aspirations of saving the world as a brain or heart surgeon when she was a junior in high school. But her place today has everything to do with how her parents gave her the freedom and confidence to explore different options while she was growing up, and instilled in her a work ethic and willingness to make lots of course corrections.
“When I was eight, I wanted to be a ballerina. My dad was very supportive, both my parents were. They really set me up to immerse me in my own dreams. I stayed with it from third grade through my senior year in high school. And it was six to seven days a week of practice,” she explained, as she sipped at her over-sized coffee mug in a corner booth of the coffee joint.
But the ballet career took a hard hit when her hero showed up unexpectedly at her front door. “I had all of my ballet friends over one night and the principal ballerina for Ballet Florida delivered our pizzas,” Melissa said. She remembers feeling dumbfounded, and asking her dad why someone so amazing was delivering pizzas. He explained that those are the sacrifices people sometimes need to make for their passion. Melissa remembers him saying, “That’s what could happen if you’re going to be a ballerina. You’re going to have to have two jobs. And I told him, ‘I don’t want two jobs. Maybe I’m going to be a brain surgeon instead,’” she remembers with a big laugh.
Soon after she decided the better path for her could be as a surgeon. But Melissa’s dad had another wake-up call in store for her. “My dad made me volunteer all summer long at the hospital. He would take me there a few days a week for the whole summer, and I would go in and see what life in a hospital was like. By the end of the summer I was saying, ‘I don’t want to do this, Dad.’
Making small adjustments make a huge impact
“My dad was supportive when it came to my career. He told me that I could do anything I wanted. But at the same time, he showed me that it took hard work, and dedication. I think the creative side of what I do today has definitely been influenced by the fact that I just had such a variety of experiences when I was younger. What I really took away from those years was that small, corrective changes mounted into long-term strengths. These little, tiny adjustments and these little, tiny edits—tweak this and tweak that—just that little adjustment made a huge difference.”
But the idea of being anything she wanted to be was also frustrating because Melissa admits she didn’t have the first idea what she wanted to do after graduating high school. Not having a clear vision pushed her to begin the painful process of figuring it out—the hard way. “As soon as I was 18, I moved out of my parents’ house. I was very independent from day one. So, I went to college for a bit. But for four to five years, I was not really sure where I wanted to go. I ended up doing all kinds of odd jobs while still going to school part-time but never really figured it out.”
Finding the missing piece
Her lack of a definitive direction did not mean lack of ambition or drive. When she’d start a part-time job working retail, it would only be a matter of months before she would find herself solving problems and working her way into an assistant manager role. She recognized there was a piece or two missing from her puzzle. “I always grew quickly in organizations. It paid the bills, 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,