Chelsea Ganer-Loh is a local avocado and coffee farmer on Big Island, Hawai'i. But sauntering the aisles of her local grocery store, she’s “Spectrum lady” to the locals before anything else — the woman who showed up in last week’s storm to restore their internet.
“There’s nothing more gratifying than when you get called out in the worst weather, you literally find the problem, needle in a haystack, and you fix it,” Ganer-Loh told Broadband Nation. “It feels really good when you can bring communities back online, or, you know, grandma gets to watch her TV again.”
While Ganer-Loh is indeed a ‘cable baby’ — raised by a mother who worked as a broadband technician — she never imagined herself following suit. Years before ever entering the field or taking over her grandparent’s farm, she was managing restaurants. “I made sushi for a living before I ever jumped into the technical space,” she said. “So it was pretty new for me, kind of nerve wracking. But I went for it.”
Like many seeking out the trades today, she was after something long-term and stable. But she took a big risk to make it happen.
Snowy starts and self-progression
When Ganer-Loh took a job with a cable company in Washington state, moving away from her island life in Kona, it was as far from love at first sight.
“It was just a whole different skill set that I had to learn. And the snow sucked, not gonna lie,” she confessed. “This kid grew up in Hawai'i, and I had to go work out in the snow and climb ladders, are you kidding?”
But beyond the elements, it was being a beginner that really took getting used to.
“I like to be good at what I do, and I struggled at first,” she recalled. “I had zero confidence when I was starting out in the field, I actually remember questioning, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ I questioned it for months because I hated it, if I'm gonna be candid.” Simultaneously humbled by the work and worried about having moved from a management paycheck to entry level, she lost passion for it quickly.
She moved back home to help her dad, who’d gotten sick — thinking she’d only be around for a few years — but she landed a job as a warehouse technician. Unlike in the Pacific Northwest, a spark flickered in her work (for which she credits great trainers), and she moved into a field position, advancing through their self-progression program to where she currently works as a maintenance supervisor.
“It's really come full circle for me. You know, I had zero confidence when I was starting out in the field,” she reflected. “I think my passion for it started when I moved back home... Every day, I don’t wake up miserable. I’m happy to come in to work,” said Ganer-Loh, reflecting on the work’s evolution. “Shoot, I come in to work two hours early, just so I can get rolling. I enjoy it.”
Similarly unexpected to the way she found stable work in her mother's footsteps, she also found her way back to her grandparents’ coffee and avocado farm — the same farm she used to avoid helping out on as a kid. Now, she's the owner.
Having just acquired a business license, life as a local farm owner is as new as cables were to Ganer-Loh not long ago. “I’m slowly making it my own. You know, Grandma had a little bit of a hard time loosening the reins a little. But I think I love what we’re doing up there,” she acknowledged. “We’re still learning a lot.”
Developing comfort with constant learning is what kept Ganer-Loh in the trade, and it's what has brought her full circle to farming now.
“I really fell into my career here. I had so much opportunity that opened up,” she detailed. “Everything just fell into place for me. This is my happy place again, to be honest.”
Grace for the beginnings
As someone who didn’t just fall in love with field work, but grew into it, Ganer-Loh's advice for those considering taking a similar leap into the field is rooted in her own rocky start with the work.
“Allow yourself some grace to fail,” she advised. “Failure is your best friend, because you’re going to learn from those mistakes.”
As someone who wants to be good at what she does, she knows how hard that can be, and to this day, she has to remember to lend herself that patience.
“I got a new hire right now, who’s a super smart kid, and I think he's great. There's a reason why we picked him, and he kind of reminds me of myself, because he wants to be great,” she detailed. “But I said, ‘It's a new job.’ So I think the biggest thing I would ever preach to anybody is allow yourself some grace, because you're new at it.”
She also contextualized that grace with curiosity, noting that being new means asking questions, soaking in everything and changing with all that you learn. And that adapting never really goes away in this trade.
“If you don’t like change, the cable industry is not for you. I’ll tell you that now, because you’ll go on vacation and come back and there’s an entirely new process. So you better buckle up and roll with it,” Ganer-Loh urged, but that’s where she finds a lot of the joy.
“The world is constantly changing, so you’re always learning something new,” she concluded. “It’s tough, but it’s kind of the fun of it.”
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