Allula Teka

I met Miss Jen in the fifth grade.

Her son Torel and I went to school together, and from the outside it probably looked like a normal kid friendship — two boys who ended up at each other’s houses more than either set of parents could keep track of. But even at ten years old, I remember noticing something. There was an energy in that house I didn’t have language for yet. The way Miss Jen carried herself, the pace she moved at, the way she talked about work like it was something alive — it was different from anything I’d seen up close before. Where I was coming from, things at home weren’t always steady, and I think that’s exactly why I noticed the contrast so clearly. I didn’t understand yet what it meant to build something from nothing, or what it cost to keep showing up through setback after setback. I just knew that whatever she had, I wanted to understand it.

What I took from her, more than anything else, before I ever worked a single hour for her company, was that how you choose to think is a decision. Not a feeling you wait around to have — a decision you make, over and over, especially on the days it would be easier not to. That idea has carried me through my whole life since, and I know it’ll keep carrying me as I get older. Life is going to hand you setbacks no matter who you are. What actually determines the life you end up living is how you respond to them, and whether you keep making that choice on purpose, day after day. I owe her that more than she probably realizes.

So when I graduated high school early — December of 2016, a semester ahead of everyone I knew — it wasn’t really a hard decision. I wanted to work for CI Web Group so badly that I didn’t see a reason to wait around for a graduation ceremony. I was living in Texas at the time. I packed up and moved to Seattle, and Miss Jen graciously let me stay with her and her family while I found my footing. She let me deep-dive into every part of the business from day one, starting at the very bottom.

My first job there was reading index cards. Miss Jen would come back from speaking events with stacks of leads — actual handwritten cards from people who’d come up to her after a talk — and my job was to enter them into the system. It sounds small, and at the time it probably was, but that’s where I first understood what our relationship with clients actually was. Reading what people wrote down about their businesses, their frustrations, what they were hoping someone could help them fix — that was the first time I really saw what we did from the client’s side of the table.

From there I moved into SEO, back when SEO was the whole game. I got obsessed with actually understanding it — not just running the checklist, but grasping why it worked — because I wanted to be able to look a client in the eye and know I was delivering something real for them. Then I moved into paid advertising, and that’s where the real education happened. Working both sides taught me the difference between organic and paid in a way you can’t learn any other way: paid gets you a lead today, but SEO builds momentum that compounds over months and years in a way paid ads never will. That contrast changed how I thought about the job itself. Somewhere in there it clicked that the growth of the contractors and companies we worked with mattered more than just handing them leads. That was the shift. I understood the weight of what I was actually doing.

Then came data — helping clients see exactly where their money was going and what it was actually producing. That mattered just as much as growth itself, because you can’t know where you’re headed if you don’t know where you’re standing. And that’s what led me to automations, which is where I really fell in love with the work. Helping clients get out of their own admin and back into what they’re actually good at felt like the clearest, most direct way I could help a business breathe.

And then AI happened.

I remember the exact moment. Miss Jen was at an event — I could hear the noise in the background — and I called her in a full panic. I didn’t even really know what I’d found yet. I just told her, “Please, go to this website, create an account, and ask it something.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Ask it whatever you want. About anything.” It took her a minute to even understand what I was asking her to do. Then she did it, and I could hear it — that lightbulb moment happening for her in real time, over the phone, from wherever she was.

Everything has moved fast since. I’ve had to learn how to scale quickly for clients, how to understand something brand-new almost as soon as it shows up, and how to see past the fear a lot of people understandably feel about it. I’ll admit — I’m the meticulous one. I’m always looking at the variables, the ways something could break, the risk sitting three steps down the road. That’s just how I’m built. But watching Miss Jen make hard calls quickly and without flinching, backed by a team that catches what any one person might miss, taught me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way: decisiveness isn’t the opposite of caution, it’s what caution is for. You still think it through. But at some point you have to move — and she’s never once made me feel foolish for needing an extra beat to get there myself.

I believe AI is just an extension of who you already are — and how you choose to use it is what actually matters. I see that every day now in the people around me: the curiosity on our team, what it’s given them the confidence to become, how much more of themselves they get to bring to the work because a tool finally caught up to how fast they think. I believe people will use this well. I’ve watched it happen up close. And every day, I’m more excited about the era we’re actually living in.

Miss Jen, I don’t know if you’ve ever fully clocked what that fifth-grade friendship turned into. You let a kid from Texas move in with your family and hand him the keys to learn your entire business from the inside, one department at a time, with no real guarantee it would work out. It’s been going on ten years now since I started in January of 2017, and I still think about that house, that energy, the way you talked about work like it mattered beyond the money in it.

You didn’t just teach me a job. You taught me how to think. You taught me that setbacks are just the price of building something real, and that the only choice you actually get to make, every single day, is how you respond to them. I watch you do that with clients now — really do it, not perform it — helping people rebuild parts of their lives that have nothing to do with marketing, because you understand that’s the part that actually gets remembered. Your drive is contagious, and it’s never once come without the love, humility, and patience to go with it.

I don’t know how to thank someone for that, other than to keep showing up and doing the work well. So that’s what I’ll keep doing.