4 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 46, No. 1 From the PLSO Office Aimee McAuliffe, PLSO Exec. Secretary Things I Learned at the Conference I want to thank everyone who attended the Annual Conference at the Salem Conference Center in January. While walking around and checking on the various details that go into planning and executing a conference, it’s always so nice to see people’s expressions as they greet each other, hear the laughter during breaks and over lunch, and know the ideas that have been shared proves the same thing each year—the number one thing everyone gets out of being a member of a community is the relationships that are formed. Relationships that can bring help on a particularly hard project, new connections for jobs, and true friends. Someone who I feel lucky to have made a connection with is our very own Surveyor of the Year and Conference Chairman, Jered McGrath. The very first conference I attended was when I was introduced as the soon-to-be executive secretary at the 2014 conference. I’m fairly certain that was the first year Jered chaired, having served on the committee already for two years. I accepted the position from the direction of the Board to the hiring task force during the conference. Gary Anderson, who is now retired, called me at home and quickly asked me to show up for lunch the next day, so I can come up on stage and meet the members. For those who don’t know me well, I’m a bit of an introvert and don’t like the spotlight. I’m not sure you’ve heard, but introverts aren’t big on impromptu spotlight lunches with 400 strangers. We like to prepare for stressful things like small talk. With that said, it’s part of the job, so I showed up to the Annual Meeting lunch where I sat next to Jered, who showed up with a planning binder that looked like it weighed 50 pounds. Anybody willing to carry that thing around all day showed me what I know to be true today: I could trust him. That was 10 years ago, and I can honestly say that the next nine conferences we’ve planned together and the four conferences with him on the Board of Directors have proven to me how much he cares about PLSO and all of you. I’ve watched as Jered’s career advanced and his responsibility grew, and have always been impressed with his ability to stay calm, find humor, and articulate forethought and balance on just about any subject. I also know that he’ll tell everybody that I do most of the work on the conference. But he’d be wrong. I may color in the details to make it all happen, but Jered creates the picture by planning the seminar programming. I firmly believe in recognizing the people who show up and Jered shows up for all of us, every year. So, on behalf of every Board of Directors that has served for the past decade (including his own), I thank Jered for his extraordinary dedication and service. Thinking of my first annual meeting 10 years ago, there is one more strong memory connected to how nervous I was— being self-employed. The position I hold with PLSO is by contract and not full-time staff. At the time, I was a newly divorced mom of a 7-year-old little girl, trying to find a way to keep her life on track. The fork in the road was to take a traditional job in an office requiring after school care, or this position that would require a little more hustle, but would allowme to create a life that worked for us both. Making that decision has been extremely rewarding on so many levels throughout the years. Especially now, when I see that she is a National Honor Student and year-round track athlete in her junior year of high school getting ready to apply for college scholarships. Those opportunities might …Industry leaders need to think of themselves as being in the “people” business—finding, keeping, and developing them. Successful firms do not have the option to be passive when it comes to talent, nor can they wait for a “technology solution” to address their people challenges.
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