Employee Spotlight: Makayla Gray – Finance Team

For December, we’re shining the B-Stock Employee Spotlight on Makayla Gray, a three-year veteran of the B-Stock Finance team who is doing work that she enjoys with people she appreciates. Makayla grew up with three brothers who helped shape her into the person she is today: a first-generation college student who found her niche in accounting, policies, and procedures. Having the benefit of supportive parents was extremely beneficial for Makayla to pursue her educational goals. Now, she’s encouraging her brothers to follow in her footsteps and earn their own college degrees.  

Makayla’s get-ahead drive started back in high school when she earned her associates degree and developed a taste for accounting. Makayla says, “I was drawn to accounting based on the idea that there’s a place for everything, if you think about a balance sheet, it should always balance, there’s always an end number that you can audit until it works.” She really loves the challenge of receiving something that doesn’t match and she gets to audit it and figure out where the problem is, “it’s like building a giant puzzle. I really enjoy the organization and the processes to find the missing piece and making it work.”

After earning her college degree, she decided it was time to leave her home town and headed south to the San Francisco Bay Area. It wasn’t long before she was hired by a large staffing agency; she figured working temp-to-hire was her best chance at success considering she was a recent college grad with no relevant accounting experience and hadn’t built up her professional network yet. Makayla recounts, “I was hired by the agency on a Monday, interviewed with B-Stock on Wednesday, and was hired by that evening.” She recalls in her interview asking more questions than she was asked; she was so excited about the product and had never heard of anything like B-Stock’s online liquidation platform before. So when she found out she got the interview, she immediately researched the industry. That extra work paid off and was noticed by her interviewers.

In her Finance-team role at B-Stock, Makayla reviews and puts together financial documents, such as invoices for clients. She spends much of her time making sure processes are smooth, efficient, and works well with other departments. “B-Stock is growing at a crazy rate, and we’re changing at a crazy rate, and Finance needs to keep pace,” Makayla says. So, she makes it a point to be proactive and reaches out to other departments as new developments occur: “I figure out how we can work together so there’s no interruptions with all the new changes taking place,” Makayla says. To help with that, in her second year, she created a Policies and Procedures manual after B-Stock’s VP of Finance, John Dokoza, decided she was the best person for the job. Makayla fondly recalls her boss saying, “That sounds like a Makayla thing,” and she happily set about getting it done.     

Makayla considers herself a ‘maker’ who loves to create. In her home office, 75% of the room is dedicated to crafts. She even had custom cabinets installed to hold her tools and materials. She just bought her first house this year as a fixer-upper and it’s become her main crafts project as she’s fixing it up 100% DIY; she even created her own Instagram account to document the progress. As if that’s not enough, Makayla is also an animal lover and rescues feral cats. She helps tame them and makes sure they have their shots and are spayed with the hope that they will be adopted and become indoor house cats.