Career Path of an Account Manager at ELREPCO

I graduated from Purdue in 2019 with a mechanical engineering degree. While in college, I completed a year-long co-op at an agricultural chemical manufacturing company called New Farm America. They were based in the south suburbs of Chicago and I was responsible for process improvement projects.

This co-op, done in alternating semesters, extended my graduation by a year. When I graduated, I realized I didn't want to work in a heavy industrial setting. Most of my full-time offers were in chemical manufacturing or agriculture roles in the Midwest.

Personally, I was more interested in working in tech. So, I turned down all my job offers and took a risk. I had never been to the Bay Area before but knew something special was happening there.

Although I studied engineering, I realized I respected the outcomes of engineering. My whole life, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. But after attending engineering school and working at New Farm for a year, I realized my strengths and passions lay more on the commercial side.

I knew I wanted to move away from agriculture and industrial roles towards high-tech. Secondly, I realized that while I wanted to leverage my engineering background, I didn't want to work in a hardcore engineering environment. So, I packed my things and drove west from Indiana to Silicon Valley.

I spent about a month landing a role and got my foot in the door in the semiconductor industry by interning at Toshiba Memory. After that summer internship, I realized I had found an interesting industry. My internship was as a technical marketing engineer, essentially a marketing role that hired engineers.

I realized marketing was a way to learn about the industry, but I wanted to be more involved in deal execution. I wanted to speak with customers face-to-face, close deals, and bring in revenue. This meant I wanted to be a salesperson.

I decided to pivot from working at Toshiba to working for their manufacturer's rep, El Repco. They have been Toshiba's manufacturer's rep in the Bay Area for 40 years. Along with Toshiba, they also represent manufacturers like Intel and Micron.

El Repco is a semiconductor manufacturer's rep. We are a third-party sales arm representing multiple manufacturers and acting as a single point of contact for customers. The customers I was assigned when I joined El Repco in late 2019 were mostly data center and autonomous driving accounts.

I had no experience in sales or the semiconductor industry before that summer. My boss at El Repco took a chance on me. Most people at El Repco are tenured, seasoned professionals who have been in the industry for decades.

As you can imagine, many of them are over 50. I was one of the youngest hires in the company's history. The accounts I was assigned were challenging; other account managers had tried them without success, so they gave them to me.

It was a risky move for me to join El Repco, but it worked out. When I joined, my account base was generating roughly $5 million a year. I joined with virtually no sales or semiconductor industry experience.

I have grown my account base in under three years from roughly $5 million a year to over $50 million a year in annual recurring revenue. That's when I realized I wasn't great at engineering, but I was glad I studied it. It helped me think and gave me credibility in the Bay Area.

My superpower was really selling, which is hard to learn in school. The best way to learn it is to go out and do it. Frankly, I was lucky my boss gave me the opportunity to do that at a really young age.