now because I have such an amazing guest here with me today, Cherise Lakeside. Without, any further delay, welcome to the Zweig Letter Podcast.
Cherise Lakeside: Thank you, Randy.
Randy Wilburn: Absolutely. Well, we're happy to have you. So listen, we always start with getting an individual superhero origin story. Right? Because we always want to know, why should somebody even listen to someone? But I would love for you just to share a little bit of your background and experience in the design industry, and you can go back as far as you want. I always joke you can go back to the womb, kindergarten, high school, or wherever you want to go, to tell the story about how Cherise came to be. Cherise Lakeside: How Cherise came to be. Well, as far as the design industry, we'll start in high school.
Randy Wilburn: There we go.
Cherise Lakeside: I was a senior in high school, and I had enough credits that I didn't have to go to school all day. And a friend of my mom said, hey, we need a receptionist in our construction company. So would you like to work half days? And then on school vacation days or breaks, you can work full-time. So I would go to school half the day, and then I'd hop on a city bus and take it out to this construction company. There was no plan during my senior year in high school to work in the design industry. I wouldn't even have known at that point what a spec writer was. But I was fortunate enough in that company for the one year that I worked there that my mom's friend was willing to teach me anything I wanted to learn. And I've always been a pretty curious person. I don't like to be bored. I've got a little bit of this. Okay, OCD is not the right word, but I have a brain that never stops. It actually interferes with my sleep sometimes because I'll wake up at two in the morning and I'm. I just started going to town in my head. And so I worked there for a year, and then I graduated. Went on my merry way, doing some other things for a couple of years, trying to figure out who I wanted to be when I grew up. I'm still trying to figure that out. And a couple of years later, my mom again. My mom, I suppose I better give her some credit, was my entrance into this business. She had been working as a financial analyst for Freightliner, and they had a bunch of layoffs and she got laid off. And I didn't live at home anymore at that point, but my little sister didn't. She was a single mom, so she was working for a temp agency for a while just to keep food on the table till she got back into corporate America. She was working for an architecture firm as an administrative assistant type of person, which she had no intention of staying in. So she told this firm they wanted to hire her, and she's like, I'm not going to be doing this for a living. But I got this daughter, and she could probably be
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