'You basically hold hands for an hour every two weeks'

 

Most people are thrilled to find one career passion that motivates and fulfills their lives. Amie Sovitski has been lucky enough to find her bliss in three: construction, business and doing nails.

Sovitski's a project engineer for Denali General Contractors and, almost a year ago, launched a Midtown business, Rose Hip Nail Studio, where it's possible to actually see her three career worlds.

"Those heavy-gauge metal studs are from a large hangar project on JBER," Sovitski said, pointing to a rack holding nail polish bottles.

A prominent wood platform under her pedicure customers' armchairs? "These are glulam beams left over from the Quinhagak school we built just these last couple of years with Denali, a huge project," she said. "That is the epitome of tying my construction and nail polish obsessions together."

'It's kind of intimate'

The nail polish obsession came first.

"I remember my mom wearing artificial nails when I was young," Sovitski said. "I was really young, and I was fascinated."

Sovitski started grooming her mother's nails, then progressed to manicuring her friends' nails.

"I had this little shop in my bedroom my junior year at Dimond [High School]," she said. "My mom would bring in cheese, crackers and something to drink. She loved it."

Doing nails felt satisfying, in an artistic way, she said.

"Some kids really liked painting, I had friends who really liked charcoal, my grandma really liked watercolors, I liked nail polish," Sovitski laughed.

Now, she still feels that aesthetic satisfaction, as well as a deeper connection to the men and women who visit her year-old salon. "It's strange doing nails-you feel very close to people," she said. "It's kind of intimate. You talk about life, hear everybody's stories. I always liked that part-how people got here, where they're from, activities they do, their hobbies, their families. You basically hold hands for an hour every two weeks. It's the only job I know where you really get to have a close friendship with people."

Joining the family business

Her other obsession, construction, began when she was 13 years old, when her stepfather asked her to work at the family business, Denali General Contractors.

"They had me making copies and stapling things," she said. "I remember being in eighth grade when my dad first showed me blueprints. They were real blueprints back then-now they're just PDF copies. They smelled like ammonia and they were actually blue."

Her stepfather taught Sovitski what a fire extinguisher looked like on construction plans. "And my job was to count them," she said. "It's a circle with an 'FE' in it."

Sovitski liked the way everything associated with construction plans and projects had to be organized.

"The copies I used to make? They're called submittals," she said. "For the fire extinguisher you have to submit the product data that shows it has the right classification, the right size; you have to submit that to the architect and the owner to get their approval. I would get those sheets, highlight the model and product number on all the copies. I liked that simple organization of it: each one had to be the same and you did it for each product-fire extinguishers, window blinds, you count cabinets, bookshelves, how many windows."

She stayed with that job through high school, progressing into doing change orders and getting quotes from suppliers and subcontractors.

"As a teenager in high school, I would make those phone calls and say, "Oh, are you bidding?' and get what their price was for that fire extinguisher," she said. "And sometimes you'd have to drive around town to get them."

Sovitski liked working, liked having money and earning a paycheck.

"It made a strong impression there with having a work ethic and making things work, problem solving," she said.

'I just wanted that other perspective'

Sovitski graduated from high school and realized she needed an academic foundation to grow her career in a direction she wanted it to go.

"I came from kind of a closed world, a family business-I only knew how they did it," she said. "Doing nails, I knew I was making it up on my own-back then you couldn't just Google or YouTube things. I just wanted that other perspective and college was the way to do that."

UAA was a good option, Sovitski said, because it was local and offered a small business administration associate degree.

"And I thought, I want to do nails, I'm pretty good at this construction management thing, so I didn't want to box myself into a specific industry. Small business made sense to me."

Sovitski didn't want to give up either of her passions-she wanted to find a way to somehow combine them in her life.

"I just got a lot of satisfaction out of both of them," she said. "Being in construction, the organization, I liked the tangibleness of watching a building go up-knowing it all the way from the plans at the beginning. For example, from counting those fire extinguishers to seeing them hanging on the wall at the end. I liked that whole process and I felt I added a lot with my organization skills."

After Sovitski earned her UAA small business administration associate degree in 2003, she spent a year at Fort Greeley doing change order management for a ballistic missile project and then went to work as a temp and then business administration manager for Tikigaq, a Native corporation out of Point Hope.

After that, she became a project manager for Dihthaad Global Services and moved to Georgia.

A subsequent move to Pennsylvania led to Sovitski earning a bachelor's degree in real estate at nearby New York University as well as getting the formal training hours she needed to acquire a nail technician license. She also was a project manager for Drexel University in Philadelphia for the division of construction and facilities.

"Which added another perspective as an owner's representative, on the other side of the table from the general contractors," she said.

When her uncle passed away suddenly, Sovitski decided it was time to move back to her home state.

"I wanted to be with my family," she said.

Her yearning to open a nail salon reemerged soon afterward.

"My mom said, 'Let's go to dinner and then get our nails done,' and there wasn't anyplace I wanted to do that," Sovitski remembered.

She didn't want to open a spa. She also didn't want to run a corner-shop type of business with inconsistent and long customer wait times. "I wanted a place where people could come to do something fun and upbeat together," Sovitski said.

Rose Hip Nail Studio was the result, a project that made it possible for Sovitski to really put her UAA education to work. "One of my favorite memories of UAA, the general requirements everyone dreads, was public speaking," she said. "I felt I learned a lot from them. I found my voice there. Technical writing was another one. I always liked writing but I thought writing was only creative writing, like storybook writing. Those classes blended in what I liked about construction, the technical aspect of it." Sovitski also found her UAA marketing education valuable.

"I still use those concepts today," she said. "That's one of the classes that I actually kept my notes and I still refer back to sometimes. It's still core concepts: Know your customer. Tailor your message and your service and your business to who that customer is that you're going after. Think about that."

Sovitski engages customers via social media-she recently hosted the "I Love Anchorage" Instagram account, which promotes the highlights of life in Anchorage and is passed on to a new person each week; took part in Final Friday Spenard and posts mani-pedi ideas to the business' Facebook page. Rose Hip offers a simple suite of services: natural manicures and pedicures, arranged with the option of online booking-no artificial nails, eyebrow waxing and the like.

And, Sovitski said, the business is allied with Handle With Care to operate as a socially responsible salon that pays fair wages plus overtime, offers safe working conditions for its staff and operates as a legal, tax-paying business entity.

"I believe there is a niche of clients that just want a simple fresh manicure and a safe, lovely pedicure," she said.

Written by Tracy Kalytiak, UAA Office of University Advancement