Jazmin Ramirez

My day started early and never really stopped. I’d get to the office, pull the inventory report, pull everything for truck stock, go upstairs and talk to the technicians, come back down with the job folders, pass out the day’s jobs, handle dispatch and on call, work through warranty information, make sure every truck had the parts it needed for every job on the board. That was my day. And I want to be clear about something: it wasn’t a grind I was counting the hours through. I loved it. I loved the people, the pace, the problem solving, the technicians. If you’d asked me back then if I needed something more, I would have told you no.

I met Jennifer almost by accident. My boss needed help handling the marketing side of our business, and we’d set up a call with her company to talk it through. I jumped on expecting a vendor conversation. One of the sales managers was on first, sweet and easy to talk to, and we started working through a plan. Then Jennifer joined the call.

We started building out ideas together, back and forth, and somewhere in that conversation something shifted in me. I remember thinking, holy shit, I actually know marketing. Not because anyone told me so. Because I was sitting there talking through strategy from both sides, the company’s and the client’s, and I could articulate things I didn’t know I understood that clearly. I had spent years looking at problems from the technician’s side, the dispatcher’s side, the customer’s side. Turns out that gives you a kind of instinct for this work that you don’t get any other way.

It would be a full year before I actually started at CI Web Group. That conversation didn’t lead anywhere right away. But it planted something. For the first time, I got a glimpse of a version of myself I hadn’t met yet.

Jennifer didn’t chase me. I chased her.

We became a client of CI Web Group, and I worked closely with Jamal, my account manager, and Kim. Every single call, I’d ask the same question: are you guys hiring? I want to work for you. I was learning the business from the client’s side, watching how they worked, and I wanted in. I kept at it, stalking, not stopping, if I’m honest, until Jennifer finally answered.

She said alright, let’s do an interview. I sat down with Bin, Jamal, William, and Mandeep, and more than one of them told me afterward they didn’t even know why they were bothering to interview me, because Jennifer had already decided.

I got the offer. And then I hesitated.

That season of my life was already a transition I hadn’t asked for. I’d lost my grandfather, and I was navigating a kind of grief I’d never had to sit with before. I think that loss is part of what kept pushing me toward Jennifer in the first place, some feeling that I needed to be moving toward something, even if I couldn’t have explained why at the time.

But when the offer actually came, I struggled. Because I loved what I did. I loved the people I worked for. I loved the company I was already building something inside of. Leaving wasn’t the easy yes people might assume it was.

What tipped it, honestly, was the people. I’d always loved that part of the trades world, being in the middle of it with the technicians, the customers, the day to day of it. But I’d moved further into operations, and that side of me was quietly being edged out. At CI Web Group, I saw a different version of that same love. Instead of one company’s worth of people, I’d get to work alongside dozens of them, owners fighting for their businesses the same way the people I already loved had fought for theirs. That’s what did it. I knew I had to say yes.

I never felt out of my depth in the early years. I came in already knowing how to build systems and processes from my time in operations, and I just applied that. I built my client list, built my process, and executed it. What helped most, I think, was that I listened closely to Jennifer, and whatever she said, I didn’t sit on it. I’d make the adjustment immediately and follow it. That habit carried me through every step of the climb, Western Regional Manager, Web Director, Director of Growth.

The moment I actually felt out of my depth didn’t come until the last year and a half, when we started seriously focusing on AI. For the first time, I couldn’t just recall my way through it. Things were moving faster than my instincts could keep up with, and I had to sit with that discomfort honestly. I had to acknowledge that I was outside my comfort zone, and that the only way through it was to learn. Not eventually. Now. Because if I didn’t learn it, my team couldn’t learn it from me. And if I didn’t learn it, the clients I was responsible for were going to feel it. So I started building.

I got in with our AI developers who were working on websites, and I learned the tools myself, put them on my own computer, and started pulling client sites into the platform to understand what we were actually doing, not just approving it from a distance. Then came a bigger shift: rebuilding our CRM system, which meant working directly alongside our AI engineers, learning new vocabulary, new processes, procedures that didn’t exist a year ago. Nine years in, I couldn’t lean on what I already knew. There were moments I had to just stop and say, holy smokes, give my brain a second to catch up so the lightbulb could actually click. And through all of it, I still had a legacy business to run. The old systems didn’t pause while the new ones got built.

The Hard Part I Don’t Usually Say Out Loud

If I’m honest about the CRM transition, there were mistakes. Things I rolled out before they were ready. Things I bypassed that should have gotten more time and more thought. I was trying to keep the legacy business running while giving the new system the attention it actually needed, and I couldn’t fully do both at once. Something always got shortchanged.

There’s a specific kind of hard in trying to adapt, trying to be all in, trying to hold the vision of what it’s going to become while you’re still standing in the mess of getting there. It’s hard getting to the place where you can see it’s going to work out the way you’re dreaming it will, while you’re still answering questions from your team in real time, still running the old systems underneath your feet. And the thing I struggled with most wasn’t the technology itself. It was this: just because I understood something didn’t mean my team understood it yet. I’d get the lightbulb moment, and I’d forget that everyone else was still standing in the dark I’d just walked out of.

What Changed in the People Around Me

AI didn’t just change our tools. It changed what sales, account management, finance, onboarding, and customer success actually needed to look like day to day. Some roles, as they existed, weren’t needed in the same way anymore. That’s a hard thing to sit across from someone and explain, especially when they’ve been doing that job well for years. It’s not that they failed. The job itself moved.

The bigger challenge, honestly, was the resistance that came before any of that. People didn’t automatically want to use it. A lot of them didn’t know how. I had to teach people not just that AI existed as a tool, but how to actually use it, how to prompt it, what to ask it, what it was actually good for in their day to day work. That’s a different kind of training than anything I’d done before. You’re not just teaching a process. You’re teaching someone to think alongside something new, and some people took to that immediately, and some people needed a lot more patience and a lot more repetition before it clicked.

When Someone Couldn’t Come With Us

I’ve had this conversation more than once, and it never got easier. There are team members who aren’t here anymore because they couldn’t adapt, or they held onto resistance longer than the pace of change allowed for. That’s an extremely hard thing to sit with, because you genuinely want them to learn it. You want them to be more efficient, to manage their time better, to feel confident instead of behind. But teaching someone to prompt, to actually think alongside AI instead of just clicking through steps, only works if they’re asking questions when they get lost. If they don’t ask, they fall behind quietly. And then the next shift happens, because it always does, and now they’re further behind than before. You’re trying to catch them up and keep moving at the same time, and sometimes there just isn’t enough runway to do both.

What I’d Tell Someone Starting This Today

Be flexible. That’s the honest advice. This is going to shift every single day, and it’s not going to stop shifting. If you can accept that going in, instead of waiting for it to settle down, you’ll do fine. Take the time to actually understand the infrastructure underneath whatever you’re building, don’t just learn the surface of it. And make time to review, to edit, to go back over what you’ve already done, because the version you built last month probably isn’t the version you need now. The people who struggle most are the ones waiting for solid ground. There isn’t any right now. There’s just the next adjustment, and the one after that.

The People Who Made This Possible

None of this happened alone, and I want to name some of the people who carried me through it.

Camille is always there to challenge me, to make sure I’m fully thinking things through instead of settling for the easy answer, and to push me to be a better leader. She’s a firecracker. She’ll tell me exactly what she thinks, and she’s always, always there for me.

Liz, I watched her when she was just starting out here, and I got to help guide her early on. Now she’s passed me in web, learned more than I could have taught her, and she’s more than a coworker to me. She’s a friend. A sister.

Ms. Kathy is my cheerleader. She’s the one always in my corner, checking in during the hard times to make sure I’m actually doing okay, or helping me see where I need to put my time and energy when I can’t see it myself.

Allula has taught me so much, on SEO and honestly on anything else I don’t fully understand. He’s the person I go to when I need something broken down until it makes sense.

Melanie is blunt and fierce. She has no problem telling me when I’m wrong, or straight up yelling at me to do better. I’m forever grateful for the friendship we have, and for the no bullshit she gives me, because I need that more than I need someone to just agree with me.

Why I Still Show Up

Nine years in, I wouldn’t call it drinking from a fire hose. I’d call it adapting. Google changes the rules, and we adapt. A client’s business shifts, and we adapt. AI rewrote how we build websites and manage our CRM, and we adapted again. That’s the actual rhythm of working here. It’s constant, but it’s not chaos. It’s just what the work requires.

All of that adapting didn’t happen in a vacuum, either. In 2023 I got married to an amazing man, and I kept working, kept learning, kept evolving, right alongside everything else happening at the company. Then I got pregnant, and I remember getting nervous. What does this mean for work? But I kept doing what I knew I was best at, kept pushing quietly, staying available even on maternity leave, still learning, still evolving, while we kept moving through the AI transition and everything CI Web Group was becoming.

And then, in the middle of my personal life, my mom got cancer. I remember exactly where I was when I found out. I was at dinner in Las Vegas with Lori from Eagle Pipe, our client, and Christina from Evoka, a rep. I was there representing Women in HVACR, a board I’d joined in January of 2026, working the event alongside Lori. In the middle of dinner, my brother texted me asking if I’d talked to my mom. I hadn’t. I was in Vegas, at work, and that’s how I found out.

Internally, I was struggling with all of it at once. Am I showing up enough for work? Am I showing up for my team? Is this going to be enough? How am I supposed to do all of this at the same time? And then my team showed up for me. Clay and Mike text me every single day. How’s today going. How are you doing. I’m thinking about you. Small messages, but they’re the thing that got my brain to start working again some mornings. Chelsea showed up at my actual house, in person, just to make sure I was okay.

There’s a phrase we say a lot at CI Web Group: so what, now what. In this position, in this season of my life, that phrase can sound heartless from the outside. But it’s true, and I need it to be true, because there is so much happening here, so much we’re building, and my focus has to stay there. That’s the strange part of this stretch of my life. So much happening, so much to learn, so much that’s genuinely exciting, and at the same time a normal life underneath it that still needs me present, that I still have to show up for, and you have to hold both without letting either one slip.

That’s why, from the outside, people see the social media posts and assume this is easy. They don’t see the blood, sweat, and tears behind it. The countless nights we’re up working through problems for our clients and for this industry. We are genuinely trying to change how home services gets marketed, bringing an entire industry into the AI era, and that is empowering, even on the hardest days. Jennifer is on the road constantly, back to back across coastlines, just to educate people. Clay and Mike are out there doing the same thing, educating consumers, manufacturers, distributors, partners, vendors, on what’s coming. That’s the scale of what we’re actually doing while all of this is happening in our personal lives too.

Nine years later, here’s why I show up. I show up for my team, because if I don’t, they feel it. I show up for my clients, because if I don’t, they feel that too. Our clients are blue collar families who have put everything they have into their businesses. I’ve been on the phone with owners who were scared they couldn’t make payroll that month. That’s not abstract to me. I came from that world. So I show up to do whatever it takes to be part of their success, because somebody showing up for them matters more than they usually say out loud.

Jennifer

I was 25 years old when I started working for you. Writing all of this out brought me back to the earlier days, sitting in meetings with you and the whole team, figuring things out as we went, ad hoc, grinding through it together. People say you shouldn’t call work a family. I do anyway, because that’s what it was, and in a lot of ways still is. We’d work it out together, and at the end of the day, I was with them, and they were there for me.

You’ve shaped parts of who I am. You helped me see a version of myself I never would have found on my own. Nine years later, I’m still learning, still evolving, still being pushed, and no matter how much I push back, or how much you push back at me, you always show up. The people who only see you from the outside don’t get to see how much you actually care, how much you love this team, how much of your own time and yourself you pour into this company. They don’t see that part of you.

I’m forever grateful to be part of CI Web Group, and to work as closely with you as I do. It’s rough sometimes. But I know that at the end of the day, we’re doing this for something bigger than either of us. For our team. Our family. Our clients. Our industry.

Jennifer has shown me a version of myself I never would have found on my own.