I didn’t exactly take a straight line to pitching projects at an agency. In fact, if you laid out my resume, it might look more like a collage—stitched together by curiosity, survival instinct, and a refusal to be bored.
I never thought of myself as being in this world at all. Sure, I was in customer service, working my way through school with a goal to take pictures for a living. But I learned a lot of lessons through those long shifts, good tips, and a roster of return tables and clients: that it wasn’t just about timing or refills. It was about reading people, meeting their needs, and making them feel valued. Same skills I use now, just in a different uniform.
I served people for a lot of reasons—grief, fear, transformation, celebration. A marathon in memory of a sister. A hospital stay. A new chapter as a mom. Most days, it wasn’t about the photos, the meal, or the leggings I sold them. It was about the care, the connection, and a listening ear that helped them walk out the door feeling a little more whole. That instinct—to meet people where they are and make them feel seen—followed me everywhere.
Eventually, that led me in-house with brands—first at Made Renovation (ah, the rollercoaster of startup life), and then PEARL iZUMi, a legacy cycling brand where I ran social.
And this is where the “stretching” part got literal. I wasn’t a seasoned cyclist. But I was repping the brand and taking mountain biking workshops, scared out of my mind. I showed up anyway. I learned. I did the thing anyway.
Turns out, that’s business development, too. It’s about knowing how to show up in unfamiliar terrain, stay grounded, and connect anyway.
Eventually, I landed in the agency world, starting as a temp social strategist for a brand that needed a little help connecting to their customers. There was no clear path forward past that. So, I made one. I paid attention. I followed the tension. I leaned into the weird, wonderful moments where clients didn’t just need strategy—they needed a partner who could see around corners, read between the lines, and ask better questions. And that’s what led me here.
Sidebar: Are sales and business development the same thing?
In many organizations, they’re separate. But in my world? They’re the same. I don’t just open the door—I walk the client through it. I’m here to spark the conversation and carry it all the way through.
Sure, I talk about budgets. I pitch ideas. I ask for the next step. But my job isn’t just to move deals forward—it’s to find the right ones to begin with. That means spotting potential, building trust, and staying curious long before anyone signs a contract.
If that’s sales, if that's BD, fine. But it’s also strategy. It’s also listening. And it’s deeply human.
Lesson 1: Business development is customer service with better timing
Everything I know about BD? I learned it from the service industry. → From listening hard and holding space. → From anticipating needs before they’re said. → From knowing when someone needs a solution—and when they just need someone to get it.
Whether I was serving tables, styling gear, or running shoots for athletes, it was always the same core skill: Make someone feel safe, seen, and supported.
Sales, at its best, isn’t persuasion. It’s presence. And when you lead with that long enough, trust becomes the product.
Lesson 2: Great partnerships aren’t sold, they’re built
When I stepped into this world, I had no formal training. But I had years of practice spotting human opportunity—not just business ones.
That's helped me tremendously here at Moxie Sozo, where from the first interaction, we’re listening for the truth under the surface. We’re not trying to “win” the client. We’re trying to understand what they’re up against—and whether we’re the right team to help carry the load. We co-create. We challenge when it helps. We commit when it counts. And we keep showing up—even when the brief gets weird, wild, or just plain hard. Because that’s when the good stuff happens.
Lesson 3: In a chaotic economy, people don’t want to be sold to—they want to be understood
Let’s be honest—things are weird out there.
Budgets are tight. Timelines are short. Expectations are sky-high. And through it all, brand leaders want more than vendors—they want partners they trust to turn chaos into clarity.
That’s how we approach business development at Moxie Sozo: not as a transaction, but as the beginning of a shared path forward.
We treat it like a service role—because it is. We listen like bartenders, think like strategists, and follow through like people who actually give a damn. Because we do.
Final Thought: If this is sales, count me in.
When you lead with curiosity, empathy, and actual human experience, business development becomes something else entirely. It becomes service. It becomes strategy. It becomes a relationship worth building.
And if you're still wondering how I ended up here, doing this thing I never planned for, you should hear the story about how a stranger bought my flight at LaGuardia Airport to bike 500 miles across the state of Iowa. But that's for another newsletter.
