Hi, I’m Liz.

The path that led me to Driftmore has been a scenic one.

Like the kind of walk when you let your dog lead, following intuition, and a pull toward the existing, the interesting, the familiar. What I couldn’t see while on the walk, though, was that it was quietly building a full map of how a business actually runs, one turn at a time. Literally.

In the fall of 2014, fresh off a dirtbag summer as a whitewater guide outside of Yellowstone, I sat down for the first time at a sewing machine and started making some of the most legendary backpacks in the world for Mystery Ranch. I didn’t know how to sew. I just knew I wanted to learn.

There’s something about taking an idea, a template, a need, and turning it into something real. Watching it come together. I was hooked, and within a year I was promoted to sewing floor trainer.

Looking back, that was the beginning of a pattern forming I couldn’t recognize in the moment. Step into something new, figure it out, then help build the structure so other people can do it too. From there, I moved into customer service, then into marketing. Different roles on paper, but underneath it was the same thing. Seeing how the work actually flowed, where it got stuck, and how much of it was being held together behind the scenes.

Not in dashboards. Not in clean systems. In people’s heads. In Slack threads. In quiet workarounds no one was really tracking.

The work wasn’t breaking because people weren’t good at their jobs. It was breaking in the gaps, between tools, between teams, in the handoffs. It’s the part people don’t always see. The part that isn’t obvious. But it’s also the part that either holds everything together, or slowly pulls it apart.

That’s the work I kept getting pulled into.

Over time, that looked like going from photoshoots to backlogs, from marketing launches to building the cross-departmental structure underneath them. Less about the output, more about what makes the output possible.

That’s where I do my best work. Building the structure underneath it all, so teams don’t have to hold everything together manually. Because it works, right until it doesn’t.