From the Rectory to the Regional Bus System: Tiffany Gunter's First Gig
by Ryan Brown
You’ve stood at a bus stop and watched a driver look right at you and keep driving. Maybe you shrugged it off. Maybe you were furious. Either way, you probably didn’t spend much time wondering what was happening on the other side of that windshield, or what it takes to run a system that moves an entire region every single day.
Tiffany Gunter has wondered about it her whole career, and now she runs it. She’s the general manager and CEO of SMART, Southeast Michigan’s regional transit system, where she oversees the buses, the operators, the schedules, and the millions of small decisions that decide whether someone gets to work on time. But when she joined me on My 1st Gig, we didn’t start in the driver’s seat. We started in a rectory, with a 13-year-old who needed a special permit from the state just to answer phones.
A Thirteen-Year-Old with a Work Permit
Tiffany grew up at a Jesuit Catholic church, and by 13 she’d decided she wanted a job, work permit and all. She became the receptionist in the rectory, splitting shifts with a couple of other women whenever her own mother wasn’t around. It sounds like a small job. It wasn’t. People show up at a church door carrying real weight, grief, need, sometimes anger, and whoever answers has to greet every one of them with sincerity, whether or not they feel like it that day.
She also became, by her own telling, the greatest altar girl in the history of altar girls, which meant she knew the church’s entire lighting system and was visible to the same parishioners every Sunday. That visibility mattered. It made her someone people could actually approach.
Never Say That’s Not My Job
The other lesson from the rectory stuck even harder: there is no such thing as “that’s not my job.” The priests didn’t do dishes, so on her shift, she did dishes. She walked the dog. She figured out which visitors genuinely needed the priest and which ones just needed someone at the front door to listen. Nobody teaches a 13-year-old how to triage a room full of adults in crisis, but the job did.
Reading the Racks Like a Map
After high school, Tiffany worked her way from a law office to a graveyard-shift call center, where she was promoted to supervisor at 18 over a team twice her age, and eventually into Kmart’s corporate headquarters. There, a routine job in accounts payable turned into something else entirely once she landed a spot in purchasing over her old manager’s objections. Assigned clocks and swimwear, categories most people were happy to let ride into clearance, she instead built her own model, tracking which stores sat near colleges and which sat near hospitals, and stocking pajamas next to campuses and scrubs next to hospitals. Her merchandise moved at full price while colleagues wondered how. The answer was simple: she was curious enough to ask who was actually buying, and then she paid attention to the answer.
Blocked, Then Called
Not every door opened easily. At what was then DaimlerChrysler, she asked a manager what it would take to move into purchasing. He told her to stand up and look around the room. “That’s what’s in purchasing,” he said, “and that’s not you.” It stung, but she respected that he told her the truth instead of stringing her along.
The real break came sideways, the way they often do. She sent a joke email to an old college professor, and he wrote back with a job posting for an urban planner at a regional planning agency, a field she’d never heard of. She read the agency’s dense long-range plan before her interview, told the panel it needed an infographic, and worried on the walk out that she’d overstepped. By the time she reached the parking garage, they were calling to offer her the job. She called her dad from the roof of that garage, torn over the pay cut. His answer was blunt: no kids, no husband, no pension holding her back, so take the job and see what she loved. Years later, when she asked colleagues at that same agency what the hardest assignment in the building was, they just laughed and said, “give her transit.” She’s been there ever since.
Undercover, Every Week
Tiffany still tests her own system the way a passenger would, standing at stops in the heat, riding routes without announcing who she is, changing her hairstyle so operators won’t recognize her too quickly. One scorching afternoon, she watched a driver look right at her and keep going. The dashcam caught her waving her arms in the street. It taught her something she now insists on across the organization: when a rider calls in angry, they are rarely angry about that one moment. They’re angry about a string of things that finally broke, and compassion, not dismissal, is the only reasonable response.
That instinct is steering SMART today. She’s pushed on-time performance from 65 percent toward the high 70s, launched a good-natured internal competition called the OTP Challenge, added Wi-Fi to buses, and made rides free for students to build the next generation of riders.
Her advice for anyone starting out echoes straight back to that rectory door: find whatever makes you feel alive, lean into it, dream bigger than feels comfortable, and never shrink for anybody. She didn’t set out to run a regional transit system. She set out to answer the door. Everything after that was just paying attention to who was on the other side of it.