Rainwater Growth - Origin Stories

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 09/30/24.

In September 2011, I took a SharePoint class, and I believe it changed the direction of my life.  And it’s not just because of the life-changing nature of SharePoint.  SharePoint really is that awesome, but my instructor, Debra Harris, introduced me to the concept of a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).[i]

About a month later, on October 15, 2011, I sent myself an email about becoming a certified trainer.  And as a person with a salary and vacation time, by the following Spring, I was enrolled in a CTT+ class at Emory Continuing Education under the guidance of Ms. Karen Maddox-Jones. But there was this written exam I had to take….

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Somehow, I buckled down, studied, and passed the written portion of my exam the following year.  With the help of Coggins International, I submitted the video portion of my exam shortly after Atlanta’s infamous “Snowmageddon” and became CompTIA CTT+ certified in 2014.

Although it would be motivating to say I pursued my passion then and carefully and meticulously started laying the groundwork that became the awesomeness that is now Rainwater Growth | Training, Research, & Consulting, that is not what happened … at all. 

Instead, I got caught up with the day-to-day work of just living.  Just like almost everyone else I know, I had family health scares, personal losses, and repetitive crises to resolve.  After the sequestration hiring freeze was finally lifted and we were able to hire replacements a fraction of the half of the team we'd lost, my training responsibilities at work were severely curtailed. Eventually, I changed jobs altogether, moving to company HQs in Maryland by Labor Day of 2018.

It was not until then, when I could not provide any training, that I realized how important that aspect of my job was to me.  Coming from an IT support background, I really wanted to help people work better.  I am sure I sounded like a broken record to my team leader, telling him, “But I have this training that I could give,” but sadly I couldn’t even help (officially, anyway) with our Division SharePoint site.

In the meantime, having a good friend with latent catering ambitions, I begin to resurrect the idea of running my very own training company.   That way, I could train "all the people, all the time," and tell them all about the wonders of SharePoint and Power Automate. (I hadn’t learned about the hard realities of marketing yet.) 

But this implementation would have to be delayed; it would require working about 10 more years and taking an early retirement.  So, as one who does love to plan, I added it to my 40-year life plan Visio document as a possibility along with some prerequisite steps I thought would help me along the way.

Fast forward to 2020... by the time we were all deep within the pressure cooker of the COVID-19 pandemic, it occurred to me that maybe I needed a change sooner rather than later.  I changed jobs a couple more times but the culture of the company I grew up with and in many ways loved so much, had changed. 

And then, as to add insult to injury, in the fall of 2022, along came ChatGPT.  Although I immediately saw the potential of how this technology could help us better serve our customers and relieve some of the pressure experienced by our frontline staff, I also realized almost as quickly that this technology would also change the training landscape.  If I was going to go into training, it would need to be soon. 

But being risk adverse as I am, I still wasn’t quite sure that it was the right time, but things seemed to fall into place or rather more honestly, every alternative I had lined up, fell out of place, so in August 2023, I filed the paperwork.  And by the end of September, I received the green light (with numerous restrictions and caveats) from my beloved Ethics department🥰.

Rainwater Growth ceased being a dream and became a reality.

[i] As a short aside, in addition to all the wonderful things I learned about SharePoint that I’m sure I then overshared with others, because SharePoint 🤷... she also shared a different perspective on how to approach work, shared copious amount of learning resources, and looped me into the local SharePoint community.  Although I didn’t stop being me and never met anyone nor introduced myself to anybody at any of the Atlanta SharePoint User Group meetings, I attended them faithfully almost every month until around 2015, when I could no longer make the drive up to Alpharetta.