Lisa’s take on:
Embracing change.
Originally from California, Lisa has called Washington home for more than 10 years. The move was prompted when her former colleague from Warner Bros. Studios who had relocated to Washington suggested Lisa do the same. Lisa’s own time at Warner Bros. had recently ended, so she packed up her car with whatever she could fit in it and didn’t look back. “I didn’t go back for any of my stuff,” she explained. “I was rebuilding. I gave away everything I had in storage to a family at my church. It felt good.”
Turning a transcript denial into a career.
Lisa took accounting for the first time when she was a junior in high school. Her AP courses meant that by her senior year, when she had transferred to another high school, she had already completed the curriculum she would need to graduate. Her coursework was equivalent to the first two years of junior college, but the colleges in her new district wouldn’t accept the transcripts from her old one, so Lisa was forced to fill a now looming educational gap for her senior year. She chose to take a second year of accounting courses and turned her proficiency in the subject into a lifelong pursuit.
The art of organizing numbers.
“I was really good at math, but accounting isn’t like math,” Lisa says.
It’s more like problem solving and puzzle work. It’s about knowing where to put things and if something is there that you recognize shouldn’t be, you have to find the right place. After so many years, you see the same kind of mistakes being made, and you just get it. It’s a balancing act. That’s another great thing about accounting. You know when you are done; it’s when everything balances and is in its place.