It is my honor to introduce our newest member, Dr. Yvonne Richards. Yvonne is the Director of the Tutoring Center in Covington, WA. Her classification is Education, and her membership has been sponsored by Doug Seto.Yvonne was born on the Caribbean Island of St. John’s Antigua and spent most of her youth on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. While attending the University of West Indies, she worked as a flight attendant for American Airlines, since the campus was conveniently located near the airport!
One summer she agreed to accompany a friend who was interested in studying hotel management and wanted to check out the programs at Cornell and UNLV. That trip led to Yvonne relocating to Las Vegas, finishing up her undergraduate business degree at UNLV, and after graduation took a job with McDonald’s.
At McDonald’s, Yvonne gradually moved up the ranks, becoming an operations consultant for McDonald’s franchises. In 2009, McDonald’s moved her to Seattle, where she would serve as a consultant for franchises in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Along the way with McDonald’s, she took advantage of the company’s continuous learning philosophy and earned an MBA from the University of Phoenix, and started a doctoral program in Education at UNLV. In 2018, when McDonald’s was in the midst of a reorganization process, she decided to leave after nearly 35 years of experience with the firm and dedicate herself to finishing up her doctoral program at UNLV, which she did in 2019.
In her time with McDonald’s, Yvonne had always enjoyed working with employees and franchisees and getting them to their “ah, ha!” moment with her training programs. So, she decided to combine her love of teaching with her business savvy, and her experience working with franchises, to open up her Tutoring Center franchise in Covington in 2019. If you do not already know, the Tutoring Center network offers one on one K-12 tutoring services.
Now, you may think that opening up a business in 2019 just before the pandemic was bad luck, but I am happy to let you know that like Amazon, Costco, Peloton, Netflix, Door Dash, Total Wine, and grocery stores, the pandemic was a great time to offer tutoring services due to the difficulties many students were having with remote learning! So, Yvonne’s timing on launching her own business has proven to be exceptional!
Please join me in welcoming our newest member, Yvonne Richards!
