From Dispatch Desks to Boardrooms

I'd started there as a dispatcher and was promoted to lead the entire team — 30 women — making me the youngest leader ever named to that position. It was rewarding and, at times, genuinely hard. Managing a team that size, that early, taught me lessons I still lean on: how to lead people, how to earn respect before you've earned tenure, and how to build a team you can actually trust. Build the right team, and you build a business that can scale. Build the wrong one, and nothing else matters. I learned that before I ever had a business of my own to apply it to.

From there, I spent years in marketing and media, learning how brands build attention and credibility — the discipline of positioning that would later shape how I built companies, not just campaigns.

There, I trained heavily in sales and marketing and became a top 10% producer across Hilton Worldwide. But the deeper lesson at Hilton wasn't sales technique — it was the service guarantee. Hilton's entire philosophy centered on the customer experience: consistent, dependable, above-and-beyond service, every time, for every guest. That standard became the baseline I've measured every business against since.

My specialty became transitioning and repositioning hotels: Joie de Vivre would acquire a property and rebrand it into an independent boutique identity, and my job was to build the sales and market position from the ground up, every time. If Hilton taught me the service standard, Joie de Vivre taught me the service experience — customized amenities, personal touch, and a culture built around anticipating a guest's wants and needs, seen and unseen. It was service as art, not procedure.

Joie de Vivre also taught me how to run a business. This is where I read my first P&L, learned to manage a budget, and understood what it actually takes to stay profitable — alongside the marketing strategy and teamwork required to deliver an unforgettable, consistent guest experience at scale. Financial discipline, personalized service, and team execution stopped being separate skills and became one operating philosophy.

From the start, I built a network of freelancers to help deliver the work, rather than trying to do it all myself — the same principle I'd lean on again later with B&W Limo. It started referral-only, one client at a time, built entirely on trust and word of mouth. The business was formally established and incorporated in 2011 as B&W Management Services, though B&W Connections remains the name most people know.

Over the next two decades, as clients asked for more than design and print — digital strategy, web presence, real technology — the business evolved with them. Today it operates as BW Elevate, a full-service digital marketing and technology agency helping small businesses compete with the tools once reserved for companies ten times their size.

My brother Antonio joined as our key driver, and for the next 20 years he was the one actually delivering the experience I'd spent my career learning to promise. Not one client in twenty years had a bad word to say about him — everyone loved "Tony." He was the standard-bearer for what a true professional chauffeured experience looks like, proof every single day that the luxury I'm describing isn't theoretical.

Rather than choosing between hospitality and transportation, I stayed in hospitality through 2012 and used it strategically: my hotel contracts and client relationships became the pipeline that built B&W Limo's clientele. My husband held the transportation contracts; I represented the hotel relationships. We traveled together, working both sides of the same opportunity — and in doing so, learned early what it actually takes to build a network and scale a business from scratch.

Those years taught us everything: wins, losses, and the reality in between. It's also when we learned the value of channeling business to other operators — high-volume farm-outs that helped smaller companies grow alongside us, a principle that still shapes how I think about the industry today.

Over the following years, B&W Limo grew from a single car to a fleet of 11 — built on the same relationship-driven, financially disciplined, service-first approach I'd trained in for over a decade, with Tony behind the wheel proving what that standard looked like in practice.

Somewhere along the way, our industry lost the meaning of the word "luxury."

Growing B&W Limo also meant thinking beyond our own fleet. Starting in 2008, I began building an alliance with several other Los Angeles-area operators — pooling our vehicles together so we could compete for corporate accounts none of us could win alone. Most of these companies didn't have a dedicated sales team; I did, along with the industry connections and access to exclusive networking events and shows built over years in hospitality sales. So I brought the business, and we grew it together. In 2013, I came to work full-time for our company, and continued building on that same alliance — which, over the following decade, expanded into a US and international network of trusted operators who could take care of our clients wherever they traveled, not just in Los Angeles. Two of those original partner companies are still thriving today, and we still work together.

It was, in every way but name, an early version of what Global Limousine Network has since become.

Owning a black car and putting a driver in a suit became a PR stunt — a look, not a standard. A true luxury experience delivers exceptional quality, deep personalization, and unmatched exclusivity that consistently exceeds expectations. Luxury transportation should pair meticulously maintained vehicles with professional chauffeurs, strict logistics, and holistic comfort, transforming travel into a premium asset — not just a premium price tag. It's easy to write that sentence. It is extraordinarily difficult to deliver it in person, consistently, anywhere in the world. I know, because I watched someone deliver it, without fail, for two decades.

GLN Intelligence Inc. is that answer: a technology, compliance, safety, and settlement platform built to hold this industry to the standard it claims but rarely proves. Global Limousine Network is the curated, vetted ecosystem built on top of it — highlighting and elevating the operators who deliver true luxury in action, every single day, not just in marketing copy.

Every stage of my career — dispatch and team leadership, hospitality sales, service culture, financial management, operator, founder — feeds directly into what I'm building now.