Mike Eads left his stable job in search of new challenges—and he found them. The information systems alum from the BYU Marriott School of Business took on roles within and outside the realm of his MISM, trusting the skills he developed during the program.
When Eads graduated in 2012, he was excited to immediately begin working for Dell Technologies. He implemented much of the lessons he learned in his IS classes to orchestrate data center migration for large companies. “The program helped me speak the language with all the various stakeholders in the data center,” he recalls. “And one of the skills that I kept going back to that I learned as an information system student was how to map out systems and processes.”
But mapping out systems and processes wasn’t the only planning on Eads’s mind. Although his career was stable, Eads felt he had potential to do more—he just didn’t know what.
Eads believed he was prepared to face the unknown, though. “BYU Marriott was really good at giving us problems without any clear solution,” he explains. The program taught him to look at problems through a creative lens. Eads used this knowledge daily at his work, but he felt inspired to apply the lessons to his own life trajectory as well.
“No one knows what the future holds,” he remembers thinking. “So if there’s something I really want to do, I should just do it.” At a minimum, Eads knew he wanted to take a break from working and spend more time with his family—so he did exactly that. He sold his house and used the funds to travel the world, living in Taiwan, Beijing, New Zealand, and Australia. Eventually Eads found his way back to the United States where he settled in St. George, Utah, and began looking for a new job.
“I wanted to work on projects that inspired me and were valuable to people at the same time,” he describes. And Eads was searching for a job with flexibility for him to spend more time with his family.
The job market in St. George at the time, he explains, was different from that of the cities, though, offering few positions that often required skills Eads wasn’t familiar with. But he applied to every job he was interested in regardless, convinced he had the unique background knowledge to aid any company looking to reach a wider audience. “Information systems prepared me to be pretty well-rounded and figure things out,” he explains.
He landed a position on the marketing team with a local asphalt company. ”I was almost embarrassed at the beginning,” he admits—a lot of his peers were working IS jobs at large, well-known companies. “But the position opened up my world to so many things.”
Eads was surprised at how well his IS skills had prepared him for the role. “As someone who took a more data-driven approach, it was an area where I found my niche,” he explains. “I was able to be a tech-savvy, master’s-of-information-systems person that could also work with marketing and sales.”
For example, as Eads continually customized the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, he began to recognize how many other growing businesses battled with their own CRM. The software tracks connections and communications with customers, and he recognized how it often plays a role in a business’s success. As Eads grew more familiar with the CRM at his job, he began to brainstorm an entirely new business plan to help businesses optimize their CRM.
“I decided that I could find clients and serve them well on my own, and it lined up with the freedom and service I was looking for,” he says. So CRM Coach was born—a business Eads has built from scratch and continues to grow. His goal is to help sales teams fix their CRM and reduce the friction between sales leaders and CRM tools.
Eads largely credits BYU Marriott for preparing him to take on diverse positions. “In the IS program, I gained a lot of confidence that I could figure anything out,” he explains—a mindset that he believes has been essential in pursuing an unorthodox career path. “There are so many cool things you can do and learn when you take weird left turns. I’m so happy that I’m able to live where I want to live and work on a company that gives me exciting problems to work on.”
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Written by Nicholas Day
