Today we’d like to introduce you to Bailey Godfrey.
Bailey, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My mom and dad are from a small town in Southwest, TN. They would eventually move to a similarly small town in FL, where my younger sister and I were born. The third oldest of four, I have a competitive streak that’s help drive me. We moved a lot, and I was in and out of public, private and home school from year to year. I loved math and science in school, and I think I’ve always had a strong relationship with them. I’ve always enjoyed problem and puzzle-solving, and math and science felt like a good place for that. I finished high school a year early and spent some time traveling with a sponsored paintball team, playing tournaments all over the nation. Getting to travel, manage money and people really gave me a taste of what you can accomplish with some organization, something I severely lacking at that time. After seeing my technical aptitude with paintball guns and technology in general, the owner of the team would urge me to check-out engineering, diverting me from the MBA I had my sights on. After years of taking things apart (and sometimes putting them back together), engineering made sense and I ended up on the path to a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida. I would later find the Professional Engineering Fraternity Theta Tau to help guide me further down my path to becoming an Engineer.
Eager to leave our native home of the South East, my husband Hadrian and I set our sights on California. I worked as an engineering intern, essentially bound to a cubicle. We would eventually move to San Diego in 2015. Being in California was surreal at first. I’ve always wanted to live here, I knew that it was a center of arts and culture, something that I felt my life in rural Florida was really lacking. I took another job with a tech company and really cut my teeth on the technical challenges there. Something about taking a broken system and bringing all of the pieces back in alignment really brought me satisfaction. It was an adult puzzle. This would pique my interest in systems engineering, a discipline that revolves around getting multiple complex systems working together, kind of putting the technical puzzles together.
I felt it was time to start working for myself a little more. I had been spending a lot of energy at a company that at the end of the day, didn’t really care much about me. I realized investing that kind of energy in myself could pay off just as big, if not bigger. I have found power in this idea and have spent my time exploring the arts in LA. Being in the heart of a city like LA gives you a feeling that you can accomplish anything.
I started ITyes to recapture some of the wonders I had had with engineering when I started my career back in Florida. I won some work designing an instrument with a film score composer here in LA, and I’ve been going ever since. The workload is heavy, but I think it’s par for the course. I know it’s a steep hill, and I know you only really learn from your failures, so I feel like I don’t really have much else to do other than to try and fail faster.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There were smooth points and bumpy points. Through each of the bumps, I learned something important, though. My family went through some tough times when I was young, they rebuilt, only to lose everything again in the housing crash. I learned early on that sometimes the things you work hardest for can be swept away out of your control, so I make sure to always have a contingency plan. I moved out to go to college, and like most, didn’t really understand the “real world” quite yet. My husband says, “For everything you do, there’s something you don’t do,” and I feel like I made it out of those years doing the absolute max I could, balancing some days between school, work, friends and love. It took me longer to get my degree than I would have liked because I had to work full-time through college to make things work, but I think that tempered my work ethic and stamina. I try to keep that type of payoff in mind when I’m about to begin a new challenge, and that helps me dive in. These challenges have helped me become the type of person that always swims, even when the water’s cold.
ITyes – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
My company is ITyes, and we want to expand the meaning of “IT” and what an “Engineer” is. Traditionally, “IT” stands for “Information Technologies”, and its use to mean a very specific thing. Now, with the emergence of technology in our everyday life, “IT Services” isn’t a specialized need anymore, everyone can benefit from some IT help. As technology becomes more prevalent in our society, especially with IoT invading every aspect of our lives, it’s getting to where you need basic IT troubleshooting skills to make it through your everyday life. Traditional IT companies limit their scope to items that are easily fixed by a help desk filled with Google jockeys, rushing you to a solution you’re not even sure you want or not. At ITyes we take pride in our ability to solve issues of any magnitude, even those that may not have been solved before. This led us to our tiered pricing model so that local small companies can get the attention they deserve at a reasonable cost to them. We also offer free IT Help to small businesses after normal business hours for those entrepreneurs who have an outage during off-hours and need some guidance to return to normal operations.
So far, we have worked in Information Technology, Intelligent Transit and Instrument Technology. It goes back to expanding the definition of “IT”. Information Technologies? Yes. Intelligent Transit? Yes. Instructional Technology? Yes. Innovative Technology? Yes. Innovative Thinkers? Yes!
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I think a big part of it is doing what you have a passion for. I maybe used to think success was about having all the free time to entertain yourself as you pleased, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found the joys in sacrificing these boredoms. This recently led me to reshape what I saw as “Success”. I talked to my close friends to see what they thought success was. I heard a lot of great answers. One of my best friends told me, to him, success was having total control of your time, and that really resonated with me. I think having control not only over your time but all of the major aspects of your life. It feels successful in being allowed to spend time worrying about the quality of your work and having everyone respect that, even though everyone around you wants you to rush. Most importantly, I don’t think success comes at the cost of anyone else’s. There’s room in the world for all of us to thrive.
With all that said, I’m still working on my personal definition of success. I know it means enjoying what I do, having control of my time, having the freedom to worry about the small things when they matter to me, and making it through without a wake of destruction in your trail.
Contact Info:
- Website: ityesla.com
Image Credit:
Matt Ross
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