How a Growth Mindset Doubled My Pay in 18 Months

I came to the interview for my first administrative position with nothing but scenes from The Office to inform me of how an office ran.

We sat down at her desk, and she perused my resume.

Speckled with a little administrative, volunteer, and service experience, but not much else, I wondered what she’d think.

She turned to me and said, “Okay, this is what I need – I need someone to create a structure for me. I’m so in over my head, business is booming, and I just need someone to pick up the slack, answer the phones, and make sure I drink water. Do you know how to use QuickBooks? Office 365 tools?”

“No, but I can learn.”

Underqualified doesn’t mean disqualified.

This admin position started with me and my new boss sitting down every morning and determining her objectives which would then determine my objectives.

I quickly learned to read between the lines to see where I could assist, create new processes, and from there, figure out what I needed to do to close the chasm between obstacle and solution.

As I settled into the position, I found myself doing something every day that I had never done before. Some days it looked like reading a telephone manual cover-to-cover to set up the office phone system. On other days it looked like updating client welcome packets and creating employee onboarding forms.

I learned quickly that I wasn’t bound by the limits I came in with. Each challenge was an opportunity to expand my knowledge, grow, and take on more. 

I took on new tasks in stride and googled my way through the roadblocks.

 Within the first week, I got a raise.

I brought a notebook everywhere. 

Company-wide meetings, quick sit-downs, on calls, conducting interviews—everywhere I went, I had a notebook.

I have countless spiral notebooks chock full of chicken scratch that carried my projects from idea to proposal to execution.

Streaks of yellow highlighter checked off tasks as complete and a coding system quickly categorized action items.

 I learned that holding a pen and paper is a real power move—a physical representation that you intend to make the most of your time; that you have thoughts to share and record and business to tackle.

There’s a secret weapon in being the note-taker in a meeting. Without asking permission, I wielded it every time. With my notebook, I set myself up to stay tuned in to each voice. I continually tracked the flow of conversation and tied together all the details brought to the table to form a succinct summary at the end.

This spilled over into my follow-up emails afterward. These emails clarified the agreements made on who is responsible for what task and when.

Harnessing my authority as the note-taker, I ensured that our team wouldn’t need to have the same meeting twice. Detailed, follow-up emails served as a reference point in every stage of the project, leaving everyone breathing the clear air of outlined expectations.

As I was seen more and more as a company-wide facilitator, my value as an employee increased, along with my pay rate.

If there’s no path, blaze one. 

I was brought in to create a structure for the owner. I wasn’t hired on with the luxury of a manual to follow, a superior to train me, or a twelve-step guide on how to do my job well.

With no job description to outline the expectations, I began to determine the value I was bringing to the role, not with a pass/failure, clock in/clock out mentality, but based on the quality of the results my work produced.

Did the processes I created truly alleviate overwhelm for my boss? Were they helping things run smoothly? Could there be an easier, faster, more effective way to do the things we were doing? What systems did we still need to put in place?

I sat down every day with these questions and found the paths to the answers.

The biggest pioneering project fell on my desk when my boss wanted to more intentionally market both her bookkeeping and spa businesses. 

Again, this task encompassed a thousand and three things I’d never done before, but with outside consulting, resources, and trusty Google by my side, we jumped right in.

After rebranding both businesses, along with rebuilding the websites and creating social channels, we settled on a sustainable marketing structure. Our new plan involved interpreting analytics across platforms each month to inform the following month’s campaigns.

I knew that the marketing terminology within these reports would go over my boss’s head.

So I interpreted the data for her and, in her words, “made it pretty.”

When we sat down to go over marketing goals for the next month, the magic of the pink dressed up the story available in the data, making it easily digestible and actionable. 

With new hats in the role came new growth in the pay scale, and I said hello to another raise.

No one else determined my value but me.

I didn’t know a lot of things coming into this job, but my lack of experience didn’t affect my value as an employee.

The only thing that could lessen my value was an unwillingness to grow beyond my current limits.   

Equipped with a growth mindset that said:

“I don’t know, but I can figure it out”

and

“I’ll find out”

 and

“I’ve never done that, but I can put something together”

I doubled my pay in less than two years.