November/December 2004

LISA SABOL: GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

If you or your company has received a proposal from us within the last few months, you know firsthand the exacting standards that Lisa Sabol brings to her job.

Sabol joined MHF Logistical Solutions earlier this year as our proposal manager, responsible for bidding on the transportation, packaging and technical service projects we handle. She and other proposal team members help devise solutions, crunch numbers and write up the often lengthy documents required in the proposal’s process.

It is a job that requires tremendous attention to detail, plus the people skills to work with different units within our company, while meeting the expectations of customers and prospects.

“Yes, it can be a bit stressful at times, with deadlines and competing demands on our time,” Sabol says. “I hope we bring a sense of humor and grace under pressure to it.”

Certainly Sabol has the experience to handle the job. Before joining us, she held a similar position as proposals manager for Shaw Environmental and its predecessor firm, also headquartered as we are in the Pittsburgh, PA, region.

Sabol didn’t start her career with the idea of managing proposals. She grew up in a small coal town in Western Pennsylvania, the paternal granddaughter of a coal miner who had immigrated from Czechoslovakia. On her mother’s side, she is the granddaughter of Italian immigrants, and is proud of her roots as a second-generation American.

Her mother was a particularly strong influence, and Sabol recounts a tale about her. As one of eight children, Sabol’s mother wanted a bicycle while growing up but the family was unable to afford one. Years later, after having raised her own family, Sabol’s mother finally bought herself a bike, and at age 69, competed in a 150-mile race. She was the oldest woman to finish.

It was also her mother who helped nurture Sabol’s love of reading, a passion that continues today. “My goal was to work in a technical library at a research center or for a large industrial firm,” she says. “Guess I got a bit sidetracked.”

Sabol’s undergraduate work was at Chatham College, a women’s school in Pittsburgh, where she majored in communications and Russian. Then she went to the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences, where she earned a Master of Library and Information Science degree.

From there, she interned as a technical librarian at U.S. Steel headquarters in Pittsburgh. She heard through a colleague about an opening as an information specialist at a company later acquired by Shaw. Within a few months of arriving there, she was volunteering to help write proposals.

These days, outside of work, Sabol and her husband – an electrical engineer who also grew up in the same coal town and now works for a regional utility – enjoy biking and working in their garden. Their son, 21, attends college in Ohio.

Most of Sabol’s extended family live in the Western Pennsylvania area. “This is definitely home, and that’s a strong part of who we are,” she says.

At work, Sabol enjoys the process of generating the proposals to earn new assignments for the company. “We have a high win ratio,” she says. “I think that says a lot about who we are here and what our reputation is in our field. People trust us.”

You can reach Lisa Sabol at lisa_sabol@mhfls.com.