Amy Prosenjak was running inventory for a billion-dollar furniture company in Ohio when her husband floated an idea that would change their lives.
Prosenjak and her husband were in their early 30s and had fallen in love with wine tourism, traveling to Napa and to Italy whenever they had the chance. One day, her husband asked why she didn’t get a job in the wine business.
“I said, ‘Well, who would hire me?'” Prosenjak recalled. “And he said, ‘I don’t know.'”
WineJobs.com answered that question for them. A to Z Wineworks, then a small Oregon winery owned by two couples and in the process of buying Rex Hill, happened to be looking for a chief financial officer, and Prosenjak said she sent her resume “kind of on a whim.”
One of A to Z’s founders, Bill Hatcher, who was CEO at the time, called to ask whether she understood cost accounting, and Prosenjak replied, “I’m the director of inventory for a $1 billion furniture company. That is my specialty.”
