The desk was in the same building. That's the part that gets me.
Monica May-Dunn walked into an escrow office in Arizona at twenty years old, an assistant with a lot to learn and no particular plan to run the place. She didn't leave. Not for a better title somewhere else. Not for a corner office across town. Thirty-three years, the same building, the same phones, the same front door she'd learned to unlock before most of us have figured out what we want to do with our lives.
By twenty-four she was the controller.
Think about that. Four years in, she was the one who understood the numbers. Not just where the money went — how it moved, why it moved, what it took to keep a firm handling other people's largest transactions honest and steady and exactly on time. Escrow is a business built on trust. You are holding the money while two strangers decide whether to believe each other. Monica learned that job from the inside, one closing at a time, for three decades.
And then, in 2023, she bought the whole thing.
No acquisition sponsor. No outside backer waiting in a boardroom to tell her what to cut. No private equity firm with a five-year plan and a spreadsheet. Just Monica. She bought Arizona's largest independent escrow company the same week it turned fifty — a woman purchasing the milestone she'd spent most of her life helping to build.
I love that the timing wasn't luck. It rarely is.
Here's what I keep coming back to. We talk a lot about ambition like it has to be loud. Like you have to jump companies every eighteen months, chase the flashier title, build the personal brand. Monica did the opposite. She stayed. She learned the numbers so well that when the moment came, she wasn't guessing — she already knew the value of what she was buying because she'd been the one keeping the books.
That is not patience as passivity. That is patience as strategy.
There were surely years when staying looked like the safe, small choice from the outside. When someone might have wondered why she didn't move on. But Monica wasn't standing still. She was learning the thing most people never bother to master before they try to own it: the actual machinery of the business, the trust it runs on, the discipline it demands. She was building the credibility to buy a company nobody handed her.
The people who might have doubted a quiet controller could become an owner weren't cruel. They were just looking at the wrong thing. They saw someone waiting. She was getting ready.
Fifty years of a company. Thirty-three of them hers, in one form or another. And now the whole name belongs to the woman who unlocked the door.
She didn't inherit it. She didn't get gifted it. She spent three decades earning the right to sign the check — and then she signed it.
I think about all the women told to leave in order to rise. Monica rose by staying, and then she bought the ladder.
