Today we’d like to introduce you to Bethany DeCola.
Hi Bethany, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started coding when I was 10 years old! My uncles were in school for programming so when I’d go to my granny’s house, I’d borrow their giant programming textbooks and teach myself how to code. I was homeschooled for most of school, but I was always self-taught. If you give me a book, I would read it straight through and complete all the activities on my own without any help. My insatiable appetite for reading and coding meant I was always at the library, and by the time I hit high school, I had built my own computer! Because I was a gifted student all throughout school, I skipped 2 grades. But this didn’t happen without great difficulty. People in the school system constantly tried to underestimate me and tried to hold me back, but my parents always stayed on top of things, and I quickly learned to advocate for myself all throughout high school. I was able to graduate at the age of 16 with a 4.3-grade average as a Certified Webmaster, which was a big deal back in 2005. My school experiences help me to learn to never take no for an answer. Whatever I put my mind to, I can and will achieve, and I seek to help other business owners and their employees to develop the same thought pattern. You can have it all, you just have to know the right workarounds to reach your goals.
After high school was over, I felt a little lost. I immediately enrolled in college studying IT, but it was for hardware, and my specialty in software, so I quickly grew bored and left after 2 years. All the while, I started a career in corporate America as soon as high school was over and worked in many different industries: Journalism, Financial, Government, and Legal. The common thread I found was that people felt like management was out of touch with the people on the frontlines, and it definitely showed. I felt a need to share my ideas for changing that, but those largely fell upon deaf ears. So, I resolved to zip my lips and keep my ideas to myself since they weren’t being implemented anyway. This, of course, led to many years of frustration: I always LOVED whatever work I was doing, but I hated the office politics that I saw so easily could be solved by better communication between management and frontline workers and greater transparency across the board.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As a chronic illness warrior with SEVERAL chronic illnesses, sometimes my greatest challenge is deciding whether I even want to do life for the day when I wake up. It can be extremely difficult to jump the pain hurdle for the day, but I am constantly learning and refining how I care for myself health-wise, and it is making a difference. I have a supportive family and friends who I can discuss these obstacles with, and they often encourage me to take the time I need to rest because as a Bonafide workaholic (it’s hereditary), sometimes I don’t know when to stop. So, listening to my body and being kind to it is something I’ve been working EXTRA hard on these days.
My greatest obstacles and challenges, however, come from within. I speak often about how imposter syndrome almost took over my life, and for a while during my 20s, I let it win. Just before the pandemic though, I grew very tired of holding myself back. I had spent the greater part of 10 years traipsing around corporate America trying to find where I fit in and found that I really didn’t. I am great with creating processes and systems and solutions for myself and others no matter where I went, but I wasn’t getting any appreciation back. I was grossly overlooked and underpaid, so I decided to do something about it. I wanted to get back to me and who I really was, a computer nerd. So just before the pandemic, I decided to go back to my first love, programming. Only I didn’t realize how different it was now. So, I began to grow disillusioned again. Did I make the right choice? I got laid off from the highest-paying job I ever had, and while that happened at a time where I needed to take time off to care for my son, I now had another baby on the way and was in the middle of a global pandemic, so I wondered where this would all end up.
As it turns out, because I didn’t just throw my hands up but I persisted, I stumbled upon the Scrum framework during my pandemic time in school, and this led to my later successfully establishing my business as a Professional Scrum Master and Technical Project Manager.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
My business, Scrum As You Are, is largely a passion project for me. Finally, all my great ideas and solutions that I craft can be put to good use by businesses who are fed up with the way things are at work. My clients are those who are tired of missed deadlines or going over budget on their projects for lack of research, communication, or transparency. They are looking for help with conflict resolution amongst themselves and are ready to just be themselves and transform into something better without losing the flavor of who they are at heart.
My job consists of being a team coach, a mediator, and a guide to all things involving Enterprise Agility. My framework of choice is Scrum. I love the simplicity of its principles, and I know that people often find change scary, so this framework encourages baby steps into the right direction, which add up to big steps toward transformation.
I facilitate my client’s meetings for them, turning the long, boring, pointless meeting (that could’ve been an email), into a short, succinct, but beneficial stand-up. I act as an extension of the team, a third party who takes a close look at what’s going wrong and what’s going right and craft solutions to help businesses see big wins with regard to their product launches or projects with a quick turnaround time just by implementing the scrum framework to speed up work while eliminating waste of time and money. Working in this way leads to happier employees, customer retention and can help to double or sometimes even triple profit margins. It also helps that I have almost 25 years of experience in development and programming, so I pride myself on rolling up my sleeves and getting hands-on with the team when the need for an extra set of hands arises.
My favorite part of my job is that I love what I do, I’m really good at it, and I finally feel like I’m truly walking in my purpose. Scrum As You Are truly encompasses who I am as a person.
What were you like growing up?
I was born and raised in Tampa, FL, and I am the child of a Jamaican immigrant and a country girl from the deep South. Growing up as the eldest of 4 girls was definitely foreshadowing for me. I loved helping care for my sisters and all their little friends, so this is where my leadership skills began to develop. My most difficult charge of all was my youngest sister, who we later found out was neuro divergent. Little did I know That experience was helping to prepare me for life as a mom of children with ADHD while simultaneously owning and running my business as a solopreneur who works with a variety of different personality types.
Everyone who knows me will tell you that I am very much the same person now that I was when I was little. As a kid, I was always an idea girl. I would come up with creative solutions or ways around things since we didn’t have much early on. For instance, we had Barbies, but they didn’t have a house or a car, so we built a house out of Lego and decided that roller skates made great Barbie cars. This reputation of having an idea for a solution when being low on resources and implementing my ideas with success carried me all the way through life in corporate America. I truly feel like all my childhood experiences led me to exactly where I am now in life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://scrumasyouare.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scrumasyouaretampa/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scrumasyouare
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scrumasyouare/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/scrumasyouare
Image Credits
Caitlyn Padmore
