Listening to new employee Nikki McFalls talk about her technical job at Cherryland can sound like a foreign language. Although, one thing that’s easy to understand is that she is making the co-op a better place.

McFalls was born and raised in Traverse City, but spent a portion of her childhood in Connecticut. It was there that she developed a love for sports and east coast sports teams like the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox. She returned to Traverse City in middle school and then graduated from Traverse City West Senior High School.

Though she was a political philosophy major at Northwestern Michigan College, McFalls always had an interest in technology, referring to herself as a “geek” from an early age. “I’ve always been a fan of puzzles,” McFalls explained. “I enjoy taking things apart and putting them back together again.”

Her interest in technology landed her an internship with a Traverse City-based tech company. She spent eight years with the company before interviewing for a job at the co-op.

Before getting a call from Cherryland’s human resources department, McFalls always had an appreciation for the co-op. “I liked what I had heard about Cherryland’s commitment to the community and their team environment,” said McFalls. That appreciation turned into a job with Cherryland this past June.

McFalls is Cherryland’s process improvement specialist. “I analyze our workflow processes from a technical standpoint and find ways we can save time and money,” she explained. For instance, McFalls is looking into using email as a means of communicating routine maintenance outages, as opposed to making individual phone calls or knocking on doors.

Another part of McFalls’s job at the co-op is enhancing member experience through technology. She works side-by-side with the member service representatives to improve systems that mediate between the member and the co-op, such as Smarthub. McFalls’ work creates better experiences for the employees who use co-op systems and the members who are affected by them.

When McFalls isn’t making the co-op better, she is making Traverse City more fun by running TC Bubble Soccer with her boyfriend, Matt. “Bubble Soccer is all the chaos and ridiculousness you wanted to participate in as a kid while being protected by a giant bubble,” she chuckled. It’s not all business, of course. When she isn’t renting it out for others to enjoy, she is playing the game with her two-year-old son, Calvin.

Between McFalls’s technical know-how and her knack for improving the world around her, the co-op’s in good hands, even if her “language” is hard to understand.