When it comes to building the skills and habits of leadership, one must draw upon a lifetime of their own unique experience. As an aspiring leader, it is critical that one takes the time to reflect upon and assess their own goals, capabilities, and habits. Amy Hedrick is one such business leader, whose journey demonstrates how to overcome difficulty, build great teams, and come up with innovative ideas and radical solutions in challenging situations.
Amy is the Co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox Technology Inc. Her background as a content creator and thought leader in the application of immersive technologies as industry disruptors provided the building blocks for Cleanbox Technology as a business. Over the past decade, Amy has led multiple teams from project inception and funding, to planning and execution.
“I’m very proud of the hard work, quality product and customer services my company and team delivered, and personally feel satisfaction that we were able to provide jobs and real-world product solutions during a global pandemic,” says Amy. She states, any honest business owner can always look back and identify efforts they plan to improve.
Cleanbox Technology Inc. is a premium, eco-friendly, smart tech hygiene company, specializing in UVC surface decontamination for frequently used or shared products. The company’s proprietary engineering of UVC light in an LED provides safe, healthcare level hygiene, killing 99.999% of contagions without the use of chemicals, heat, or liquids.
“Due to COVID-19, immersive technologies have become even more important for many industries and observing their growth in business applications, we have been able to identify pain points we can solve and we build out new product lines to address different,” says Amy.
Independence to Work Freely with Better Career Opportunities
According to Amy, a positive work culture is important for a growing business. Cultivating, building and maintaining a positive work environment and sustainable culture is critical for individual fulfillment, since the average worker spends the majority of their life working for someone else. Cleanbox Technology offers its employees the opportunity to work remotely and the independence to hone their strongest skills.
Travelling Around the World
Amy admires high velocity risk takers as well as leaders who quietly work to impact the world around them. Most of the people who have influenced her life don’t have name recognition. The biggest thing she credits for opening up her mind and exploring new ideas and opportunities is travel.
Amy started traveling around the world at age 15 and never looked back. She asserts “I’m not talking about vacations. My life choices were absolutely impacted by sleeping on dirt floors in Uganda, making friends in the mountains of Northern India, being taken care of by strangers after I’d sliced my arm open in the Philippines, learning to sing in Swahili, visiting summer camps in Russia, observing traditions of multiple faiths—and yes, having drinks at the Ritz in Hong Kong.” She believes feeling fear, sensing danger, watching happiness, traveling alone, observing human responses conditioned by their social and economic situations are her greatest influences and her ongoing inspiration.
Supporting is Essential for Leadership
Amy feels fortunate to engage with a number of multitalented, accomplished women who are making waves in their respective areas of technology. She believes that providing both professional and personal support to other women in leadership is key to opening doors for other women and establishing a leadership culture that doesn’t keep women at the bottom.
She opines “I think that the more you accomplish and experience throughout the course of your life, the more you will want your knowledge and insight to live beyond you. Providing work and mentorship opportunities is a great way to do that.”
Trust in Yourself
Amy’s advice for emerging female leaders is “embrace the fact that you’re a woman—then move past that and lean into the skills you’ve honed that make you a good leader who can build a successful business.” She believes an empowered woman can bring greatness to the team around her.
Expanding with Every Passing Day
“We’re planning to continue to support businesses and their employees on their path toward reopening, and to make the Cleanbox brand a household name when it comes to trustworthy, eco-friendly and intelligent decontamination,” says Amy. She further adds, once things return “to normal,” the public will very much have the potential risk of new contagions on their minds. Maintaining business and consumer safety will continue to be prioritized.
Cleanbox Technology has already expanded its product lines to meet business needs outside of VR, AR and MR space. Cleanbox is currently in 40 countries, and Amy anticipates that number will double as the Cleanbox team grows, and increases the number of products it offers.
Amy Hedrick, CEO and Co-founder, Cleanbox Technology
