Amanda Armstrong Sava will tell you she is not a talker and not a connector. She is a helper. If you need a service, she knows a person. If she does not know the person, she will find one. And if you need a cat moved from Tokyo to Seattle, she has done that too. (The niece was in town for the Taylor Swift concert. The cat came in a backpack.)

She runs the Seattle branch of Neil Kelly Company, a design-build remodel firm founded in Portland in 1947: four branches, still owned by the Kelly family, and a certified B Corp, which is part of what drew her there. She was a designer for 25 years (kitchens, interiors, interior architecture) and moved into the general manager seat about two years ago. Same job, she says, fulfilling in a different way. She used to bring clients' dreams to reality. Now she helps her team do it.

Her psychology degree sat unused until she went into sales, and design, in her words, is sales. The drawings are not the hard part. The people are always the work. Somebody sees a thing on HGTV that will never fit their space. Somebody sees drywall for the first time and thinks the whole remodel has gone wrong. Amanda's job is to walk them down into the low point and back up the other side, marriage intact.

She is an introvert disguised as an extrovert, and she is honest about what that costs. A room like Homecoming fills her cup and empties it at the same time. Her method for building community anyway: quietly and slowly. Stop, read the room, find the one other person doing the same scan. They are out there. She promises.

And the room everyone gets wrong? The living room. Ninety-nine percent of people put the TV front and center, and the one space in the house where people could gather without electronics never gets built.

What she gives the room: an ear, a shoulder, a wide "I know a person" network, and a very good trivia partner as long as the category is not music. What she is looking for: she has been in Seattle seven years, half of it during COVID, so she is still building her people. A lawyer she can point a client to. A financial planner for her kids. Someone for her retired husband to golf with. And an introduction to Carmen Best. She said it first.

CONNECT WITH AMANDA
Neil Kelly Seattle: neilkelly.com/seattle
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amandasava
Instagram: @asavakd
Neil Kelly on Instagram: @neilkellycompany

LISTEN + SHOW NOTES
joinvantage.co/podcast/amanda-armstrong-sava

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