One of the many reasons LevelEleven’s lucky to call Detroit home? The increasing boomerang effect, where Michigan natives who once left – some for adventure, some for jobs – return home upon recognizing new opportunity, often within the rising tech scene in Detroit.
At LevelEleven alone, we’ve welcomed individuals back to Michigan from Georgia, Illinois and New York to be part of our team. And we’re about to bring back our first West Coaster. Scott Shepard, our new VP of Sales, currently resides in L.A.
“I was intrigued by the opportunity and by LevelEleven but also by the entire DVP portfolio and rebuilding the city and bringing young people and technology back,” said Scott in an interview with Crain’s Detroit. “I really have always had that Detroit pride and been following what’s going on in the city from 2,000 miles away.”
He’s not the only one who will be traveling those 2,000 miles to call Michigan home, either: Scott will bring his wife and two young children with him. They’ll all officially make the move after the school year, and they’re not sure quite yet in which neighborhood they’ll land. In the meantime, Scott will commute from L.A. to Detroit on a regular basis.
Scott joins LevelEleven with 15 years of sales and sales management experience in both startup and Fortune 500 environments. He spent 11 of those years at HotJobs, an online job search engine, which he helped to grow from small startup to eventually a division of Yahoo! and then a company acquired by Monster Worldwide. His most recent position was in sales leadership at SteelHouse, an award-winning ad:tech company.
According to Crain’s, Michigan sees in-migration from one state: New York. California makes the list of states that we primarily export to, along with Texas, Florida and Arizona. In this particular scenario, we’re happy to put that trend in reverse and bring one of those exports back home.
