Kelly West

Founder/Chief Executive Officer, The MilesWest Group

When I was five months pregnant, I left my studies at Boston University and moved back home to Denver, Colorado. The only person willing to hire a single, pregnant, college drop-out was a local Realtor named Alice Marsh. At a time when diversity wasn’t talked about, Alice lived it. Our team was made up of people from every walk of life; differently abled, black, gay, white, veterans, Latino, Jewish, men and women. Her only expectation was that we get along and get our work done, and we did through highs and lows. That experience, as well as the myriad of experiences that I have had as a black female executive over the last 35 years, has influenced my desire to always find ways to lead across, lift-up and empower everyone regardless of who they are, how they identify or where they are from.

In 2019, I was working in Toronto, when my husband called to say he thought he had a second stroke to his optic nerve. Days later, my brother called to say that my dad had been diagnosed with cancer. I worked out an arrangement with my employer, left my job and moved back to Denver to be part of a caretaking team for my husband and father. During that time, the MilesWest Group was founded. Originally, I thought it would be something to keep me busy while I looked for the next great Leadership role in Global Mobility, but along the way, I realized that having a company of my own and succeeding on my own was incredibly important to me.

Over the last three years, we have grown from a single proprietor to a small team, leveraging 40+ years of real estate and relocation experience to create a consultancy focused on creating a fair and level playing field for our clients, their employees, and their supplier partners. We do this through strategic advisory, supply chain diversity, benchmarking, voice of the customer and business optimization consulting services, in addition to our relocation and assignment offering. We are always looking for ways to add value, organically. We listen to our clients; we create an understanding of the need and then we either create a process to manage it or we find a partner to provide it. Our goal is to create growth opportunities for our clients and everyone else around us, to add opportunities for generational wealth creation in underserved communities and to leave the Earth a little bit better than how we found it.