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Parents - Take Your Girls to
Work!
by Christine Harvey
What you expose your daughters to, on the work front, can dramatically
influence their likes.
Deborah Chah now owns four
companies in property development, real estate sales and finance. When she
was 16, she had her first part time job driving heavy equipment in
construction in Cleveland, Ohio. She got her start in heavy equipment by
riding alongside her dad in their family business when she was only three or
four years old.
The Mall
She got her union card at 18.
“I saw all my friends working at Dairy Queen and the mall for $3.75 an hour
and knew I could make $13 an hour with my union card,” said Deborah. It
seemed as natural as anything to drive the equipment because of her family
background.
She was only the second female
in her Local to have a union card. The other was her older sister.
The heavy equipment was so
much a part of their lives, that when the two girls were teenagers, they
used to lift their four year old brother up to the second story window of
their house in the boom of the backhoe.
Thus Deborah worked her way
through college driving huge tractor hoes and road graders – it was second
nature to her.
Ultimate
Power
I asked Deborah what it felt
like to drive such heavy equipment. “Ultimate power,” was her reply. “It’s
that, ‘um-m,’ sort of power. The larger the equipment, the higher the pay
and the hierarchy.”
It’s a field, she feels, in
which men are very resistant to having females. But it doesn’t stop 5’4”
petite Deborah. She saw it as a way to have doors opened in the industry.
The next step could have been to become a survey engineer, civil surveyor or
specialized equipment operator, all earning $45 an hour or more.
But after getting her degrees,
she decided to sell real estate. “Then I became a project manager and got to
use my skills in overseeing the construction as well as the selling,” she
said.
Next, she purchased the
marketing arm of the company, then continued to develop the real estate
brokerage, and mortgage brokerage. Finally she started purchasing land and
developing homes.
Ultimate
Reward
In April 2000 Deborah Chah was
acknowledged by her industry as the MHI winner of the ‘Best Established
Sub-Division’ in the nation! Her company sells almost 400 homes per year and
has 60 employees in four companies.
Now Deborah takes her own kids
to work with her!
Want to learn
more? Motivation Marathon, a 4-CD series with Beth Walkup, Sue Dyer
and Hilde Bartlett is still available! More than three hours of conversation
with Christine Harvey about
How they create success, joy
and prosperity in their lives without loosing the adventure.
Visit our
eShop
to get your 4-CD set now!
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