* Name: Ashley Doherty
* Position: Franchise president
* Location: Molly Maid
* First job: Camp counselor
* Best part of the job: “The best part of my job is coming in and turning all my lights on, seeing all my ladies and asking them about their day. I’m a morning person, so it’s good for me. It’s like a big girls’ day every morning, because we’re all girls, in a room every morning. You can only imagine what that’s like.”
* Most challenging part of the job: Managing the schedules of 15 people. “I make sure everyone has time for their family and time to get to appointments, but still know we’ve got a job to do. To be here every day is really important to us.”
* Family feud: “We’re a big family,” Doherty said of her staff, “so people argue and people get into little tiffs, but at the end of the day we’re a family and we all love each other. We’re all here to work as hard as one another.”
* What she’s learned: Patience. “When you’re in the service industry, you really don’t have a product, you just have a service. You’ve got to be patient with your customers as far as relaying what the service is going to be. Then you’ve got to be patient with the employees as far as making sure they come in every day and the different moods they might be in. It’s been interesting in the last 3 1/2 years from what annoys me now compared to what annoyed me back then.” She has become, she said, “more of a roll-with-the-punches kind of person.”
* How to make a career of it: “Start with research. Know what you want to do, know what you like to do. If you’re not a people person, don’t get into the service industry. And know that it’s going to be really hard for the first few years, and will probably be hard for your whole life.”
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