Growing up as the daughter of a very respected and successful fresh produce executive, discussions about business challenges, emerging opportunities, and the accompanying legal challenges were the impetus for my eventual pursuit of a law degree. The strategies and legal maneuvering that sometimes took him to court made his work incredibly relevant and fulfilling. I wanted this to be my own experience.My path to becoming a member of the California State Bar was crooked but full of experiences that were well worth the diversions. The decision to get a teaching credential gave me thirteen years in a classroom where I learned that structure was an indispensable component to achieving critical goals for myself and my students.It was here, working with students, parents, and staff, that I began to see that maybe my father’s joy in his work was as much people-related as the work itself.I love teaching, and my teaching job paid my way through nighttime law school. But when the door opened to own truck brokerage, the lure of entrepreneurship was irresistible. The biggest challenge was that the business was bankrupt when I took over. With logistical skills from prior brokering employment and a lot of hard work, we emerged from bankruptcy and never looked back!On the eve before a big contract meeting with a key customer, I called my father from my Boston hotel room to get last-minute tips. He advised me to think about the structure of how I successfully got every load from dispatch to delivery and to talk about how these steps saved or made the customer money. I got the contract and realized again how key structure is to how we work. Years later, the FDA added a transportation regulation to FSMA that required trucking companies and brokers to comply with transportation-related food safety requirements. My propensity to operate from a system led to a proprietary food safety plan for our carriers. The one question I had about our compliance was about the cleanliness of the trailers that were transporting our expensive fresh produce cargo. Current washout practices were anything but ‘best’ and companies needing to comply with FSMA didn’t have cleaning options available that aligned with known food safety sanitation science.Three partners and I invented Healthy Trailer LLC. And yes, my father is one of my partners. Systems, engineering, and machinery are beautiful, primarily because of the structure that produces consistent and reliable outcomes. This is incredibly important in the pursuit of keeping our food safe from farm to fork.