November's Meet the Team Monthly is our COO, Mandy Ballinger! Mandy joined the NextChapter team as our first full-time employee just three years ago as Customer Success Manager. Before coming to NextChapter, Mandy worked as a paralegal for a firm that specialized in foreclosure and prior to that worked at a Chapter 13 trustee’s office. We are lucky to have such a special member of our team, who is so knowledgeable about bankruptcy and dedicated to improving our software!

 

 

Mandy, her husband and her daughter at Norris Lake! 

 

 

Location

 

Mandy works out of NextChapter's HQ in Columbus, Ohio. Her favorite place to work in the office is right outside on the patio. We have a nice view of the water!

 

 

 

Mandy's Job Duties

 

• Oversee daily operations
• Work with the development team to build and maintain the application
• Communicate with the courts and trustee's offices to keep our legal data up-to-date
• Collaborate with Customer Success Manager and interact with users to ensure customer happiness

 

Mandy loves working at a tech startup because she loves getting to wear so many different hats! Her day-to-day tasks can vary greatly and she thrives on the variety of things she gets to do. She also really loves apart of a new company and helping to establish the workplace culture. Mandy also finds working with a small and passionate team to be very fun and rewarding.

 

Her favorite tool to use at NextChapter is Slack, which is an online communication tool for teams to collaborate and chat individually and in group. While we are headquartered in Columbus, we have some members of the team that work remotely from other parts of the US and outside of the country. And we also encourage the team members in Columbus to work away from the office in coffee shops or outside when they need a change of atmosphere. Slack helps us to remain in constant communication with each other while still giving us the freedom to work from different places.

 

As a former paralegal who spent a lot of time doing data entry, Mandy's favorite NextChapter feature is is MyChapter, a secure online debtor portal to collect information and documents, because it helps to eliminate unnecessary back and forth communication with the debtor.

 

Mandy is a firm believer in starting your day strong and planning your work with the most difficult tasks at the start of your day. She's the most focused in the morning, so she will start her day with the most challenging and most important tasks. This also helps her to feel accomplished in knowing that she achieved the most important goals early in the day, just in case unexpected tasks come up later on.

 

Mandy is a bit of a bookworm and loves getting lost in a good fiction. She also enjoys yoga and recently started doing hot yoga as a great stress reliever. But her favorite pastime is going on adventures with her husband and daughter!

 

 

 

 

Look out for next month's Meet the Team Monthly!