Meet Our Team – Sara Dunphy-Acevedo

As part of RCN Capital’s 10 Year “Birthday” celebration we interviewed different team members about their time with the company.

Let’s meet our team member, Sara Dunphy-Acevedo.

My name is Sara Dunphy-Acevedo, I’m considered a Staff Accountant, but my role has changed over the years. I’m still officially a Staff Accountant, but I do a little bit of everything. I’m the go-to when people need to find stuff, so I mostly dig in and find the information that people need. I’ve found my niche!

How long have you been with the company? Since May 2013

I started at the company back in 2013, so it’s been about seven years!

How did you start your career at RCN Capital?

I was working as an administrative assistant and we were in a department that lent services out to RCN. At the time, RCN was a spinoff of a bigger company. We had departments where we would lend ourselves out and help out different departments and RCN was one of them. They had an opening for a Staff Accountant, and my manager referred me so that’s how I got my start at RCN.

How has the company grown since you join the RCN team?

Well it’s grown in every way possible! Employee-wise, the amount of people that we have on staff, has grown exponentially. When I started there was about ten people and now, we’re up to over 50. Other ways we’ve grown is in business! We used to do around twenty loans a month and it has grown to over two hundred a month, so it’s grown in every way possible and it’s great.

What do you look forward to the most coming into work each day?

The thing I look forward to most going into work everyday is being able to tackle and solve problems to get things straightened out. It gives me the juice, being able to know that there are problems that I can solve and then solving them. It’s kind of a nerdy motivation!

How would you describe RCN’s company culture?

I would describe RCN’s company culture as very energetic. We always have a lot of energy, right from Jeff Tesch, down to all the people in the departments. Jeff has a lot of energy and that rubs off on everyone else. It’s very encouraging, very energetic, we always have that attitude that “yes we can tackle this, we can do this!” It’s a very positive and encouraging environment, and of course, it’s like family for me. It has a lot of different aspects that I like!

What/Who has been your biggest motivator?

I would have to divide my biggest motivator professionally and friendship-wise. What motivates me on a daily basis to come in is my co-workers that I get along well with and people that I want to help.

On a professionally level, eventually where I want my career to go. That was sparked by a former employee. She had come in as a Business Intelligence Developer and at the time, we were taking care of closing our month-end accounting stuff. It would take us weeks to do things, she came in a showed us, by pulling reports and data, and showed us how it could be done in hours instead of weeks. That really sparked something in me where I was like “we need to learn more about this whole database thing and reporting.”

I’ve been on a journey to try to learn more about the technical side of stuff to help us in what we do every day. That opened a whole door for me career-wise and she was the first person to spark that for me.

Advice for someone who is just starting their career.

The advice that I would have for people who have just started their career is to learn as much as you can, broad-spectrum. Learn as much as you can about everything that comes across your desk. There are going to be certain things that you will look at and want to know more about. That’s how you get to the point that you will want to know what you should specialize in.

When you first start out, you kind of don’t even know what you want to do or where you want to go because you have experienced a lot of things. Once you start exposing yourself to different scenarios and things that you deal with on a daily basis, you’ll end up realizing that there are certain things that call-out to you that you want to know more of. That will guide you to see what you really want to specialize in.

For me it was when I was dealing with day-to-day accounting stuff and we ended up having a lot of issues with data. Little by little, I found it really interesting that I wanted to know more about this. This really helps when I’m trying to do this, like I can take a task that’s hours long and do it in minutes. That has led me to eventually go down the path of a data analyst. Unless I was exposed to those kinds of things, I wouldn’t have known what I actually want to specialize in. Put yourself out there, get exposed to everything you can think of career-wise and then specialize in those things that interest you.