Hardwood at the Heart of a Happy Career

By Denise Williams | Channel Connection

From her years as the only girl on her high school soccer team — and, eventually, its captain — to present day, being the lone female in a space otherwise claimed by males has never been an issue for GeorgeAnne Blackmon. In fact, the only time she ever ran from it was in college, when she was the sole coed in many of her the agriculture, ag business, and crop science classes at North Carolina State University. Unmistakenly recognizable among her classmates, Blackmon decided to ditch the makeup and start wearing hats in an effort to blend in with the fellas — not because she felt uncomfortable, mind you…but because she wanted to cut class unnoticed every now and then! “And it was very obvious if the one girl wasn’t there,” she laughs.

That bit of mischief included, Blackmon’s never let the male: female ratio hold her back from anything — least of all how she chooses to earn a living. Today, as a senior sales executive with Decospan, she sells hardwood plywood to distributor partners; and most of her points of contact happen to be men. It’s nothing to find her at a business lunch with a group of 15 to 20 of them…and she’s still unbothered. However, it sometimes catches the wait staff by surprise, Blackmon has noticed with amusement. “When they bring the check, the waiter or waitress always kind of looks at me like, ‘Are you the boss?!’” she says, replaying the typical exchange. “Well,” she often responds, “I am the one signing the check!” She finds humor these days in the lingering vestiges of wide-eyed astonishment that a woman is actually steering the ship.

But it wasn’t always so funny.

Death By a Thousand Paper Cuts

Blackmon remembers her earliest working years, long before she found her happy place with Decospan. Even back then, when she worked in the brick industry, she can’t recall many outrightly egregious examples of being treated differently because of her womanhood. Instead, she describes a series of small, slight offenses or, as she frames it, “death by a thousand papers cuts.”

It wasn’t uncommon, for example, for Blackmon to expertly answer a contractor’s questions, only for said contractor to turn around and check with a male colleague for validation. Right in front of her face. It was “infuriating,” she admits, but fortunately also short-lived. Not only did her team members assure that Blackmon’s response was correct, they acknowledged that she was more knowledgeable about the matter than they. End of problem.

Thankfully, Blackmon rejoices, that experience didn’t follow her into her next line of work — selling plywood into distribution — despite the heavily male presence there. In fact, it was a male who brought her into the industry and took her under his wing during those learning years. They remain in touch even now, and she still reaches out to her mentor when she has a question she can’t answer for herself.

With this kind of introduction to plywood, Blackmon says she never felt she was working in a deficit because of her gender.  “Not to say I’ve never been uncomfortable,” she begins, “but it’s certainly not an uncomfortable place to be for women.”

“I think what is uncomfortable is women don’t know that this industry is more inclusive and is more open than they realize. It’s intimidating only if you don’t recognize that,” Blackmon continues. “A lot of the women that I know through NBMDA of course have leadership roles in their companies and they’re very strong women. They hold themselves to a very high standard; they do their jobs very well; and they command respect, because they’ve earned it.”

The Keys to Success

The stepping stones to emulating that level of success are the same for anybody, Blackmon asserts:

• Don’t just do the job. Do the homework, too, Blackmon advises, emphasizing the importance of understanding what the customer needs.
• Go the extra mile. There’s positive impact from putting a little additional effort into showing customers that they matter, she adds. This concept is nicely illustrated, Blackmon points out, in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality,” which she heard a speaker reference during the NAFCD + NBMDA Annual Conference in October.
• Make somebody’s life easier, if you can. “It’s just doing your job, but doing it to the best of your ability,” Blackmon explains.
• Listen. Sales people love to talk, agrees Blackmon, who pleads guilty herself to sometimes thinking ahead, anticipating what the other party is about to say, as she tries to resolve an issue quickly. However, she reinforces, it’s just as important to “listen to hear and not listen to respond.”
• Don’t be intimated. Even a self-assured person can find themselves with a case of nerves at some point, Blackmon bets. The trick, she says, is to remember that “just because a situation is intimidating doesn’t mean you have to be intimidated. Sometimes you just have to inhale, stand up straight, and walk across the room to say “hi.”
• Be genuine, and don’t over-promise. Salespeople want to solve problems and they want the sales win, she admits, but there’s nothing worse than having to go back to a customer to tell them the price is higher than quoted or that the delivery is going to take twice as long to reach them.

Back to Her Roots

Working at Decospan, selling plywood, and interacting with the distributor community (including a seat as Co-Chair on the Steering Committee for NBMDA) have meshed together nicely for Blackmon, who says she’s found the “right fit” professionally.

She can’t help but smile when she thinks about how her work has brought her full circle. Growing up on her family’s South Carolina farm in the tiny rustic community of Drake — Blackmon’s self-proclaimed “favorite place on Earth” — cultivated an unbreakable bond with the land. Ironically, the little outpost was also home to a veneer/plywood mill that barely registered with her back then. Farming was her first love, and the reason she majored in agriculture and crop science. If not for the turmoil gripping the farm chemical business at the time Blackmon graduated from college, she imagines her career very well could’ve gone in a somewhat different direction. She’d still be in sales, she suspects, but she’d likely be selling chemicals to farmers or running a sales team that was out on the road every day.

The 12-year detour through the brick industry ultimately delivered Blackmon to hardwood plywood — which, she explains, is essentially a crop. “At the end of the day, it’s still something that’s growing and is harvested before being produced into something else,” she says reverently. “It really got me back to my agriculture roots in that regard. Of course, I’m not on the farming side of it; I’m on the production side, but it’s still there.”

Blackmon can pinpoint exactly when she embarked on her journey selling hardwood into distribution: as of April 1, 2025, it will be 10 years. When she started this chapter of her career, she remembers having a private laugh with herself. “I didn’t know,” Blackmon suggests facetiously, “if it was an April Fool’s Day thing on the plywood industry or if the joke was on me.”

Neither, as it turns out. “Working in the plywood industry is something I thoroughly enjoy and I love working with my distributor partners,” she says. “Finding new customers and helping my current customers solve problems. My job is to make people’s lives easier, even if it’s just how to buy your plywood.”