Kathryn Messner
Shred-it
Construction never runs according to schedule. Just ask Cindy Brown, owner of Shred-it, a document destruction company in St. Louis. In 2005, her office construction was running behind. When she asked her landlord for an extension, he said they were welcome to stay on a month-to-month basis…as long as they tripled the rent payment.
Fortunately, Brown had found a key employee several years earlier, Kathryn Messner, sales and office coordinator. Some would call what Messner did at this point “stepping up to the plate” or “taking charge.” But, there really isn’t a cliché that is fitting for what Messner did.
“I told them that we could run the office out of my house,” says Messner. “I had just moved into the house and was still getting settled. I was willing to help where I could.”
What Messner makes out to be a meager task was actually a finely-tuned orchestration.
“Kathryn said that we could have the phones forwarded to her house,” says Brown. “She was the receptionist and called us when calls came in. The guys in the box truck would drive to her house and get the invoices for the day. The payments went to a post office box, and I would post payments from my house. Every detail was accounted for. As far as our customers knew, there was no difference in how we did business. We did not lose a single customer during that time.”
To Brown, the stunt that Messner pulled is a small example of the type of character she has. “She has the ownership mentality,” says Brown. “She never presents me with problems unless she has looked into solutions.”
One solution that Messner provided was a way to make sense of an old software system that Shred-it’s corporate offices use. “She taught herself how to mine data out of an old system, and now we can sort and slice it for projections, marketing plans or any business decisions we need to make,” says Brown. “That is invaluable. It would be a manual process otherwise. She can get us the information we need to make solid business decision quickly and efficiently.”
Messner joined the Shred-it team in 2002 after becoming a casualty of the dot-com bust. “I figured paper was the farthest thing from IT,” she says. “I wanted to work in a place where I could grow with the company and make a difference. Small business gives me that opportunity.”
According to Messner, Brown has created the environment where a talent like Messner’s can grow. “Cindy is very supportive,” says Messner. “She lets me know the goal, gives me parameters and allows me to be creative to accomplish things.”