((Left) Britt Porter at a Buckingham Resources jobsite growing up (Right) Britt Porter at a current Buckingham Resources jobsite | Photos courtesy of Buckingham Resources)
College football. Global technology events. Custom home construction. On paper, they have little in common. For Britt Porter, they share an important thread: bringing a vision to life.
After a 15-year career spanning sports and technology, including nearly eight years leading global teams at Salesforce, Porter recently brought her experience somewhere that might seem unexpected: Buckingham Resources, a locally based custom home building company her father founded in 1990.
Porter and her brother grew up playing in the mud at their dad’s jobsites, watching him build custom homes and a business while their mother built a successful career of her own in technology sales. At home, Porter was the kid who volunteered to help her dad assemble a new barbecue or piece of furniture, fascinated by how the pieces came together and their lasting impact.
Porter grew up dancing competitively and continued through college. Looking back, she now sees a connection between what she loves about dance and the way she approaches her work.
“I always loved the creative side of dance, but also the organization and structure of the routine,” Porter said. “Each step is a creative expression, but it’s also part of a process: learning the details, perfecting the routine and building toward a greater goal.”
Sports also became the starting point for Porter’s professional life. While attending Oregon State University, she interned with the University of Alabama football program under Nick Saban, followed by corporate roles with Nike, San Diego State football, and Adidas.
Then, in her 20s, Porter took a leap.
She left Oregon and moved to San Francisco without a job. Drawn to the opportunity and energy of Silicon Valley at a transformative time in technology, she joined a startup with a lean marketing team, where curiosity and a willingness to jump in mattered as much as experience. Porter thrived in the environment, learning quickly and figuring out how to turn ideas into action.
Those early experiences eventually led Porter to Salesforce, where she spent nearly eight years building a career in global events and rising into director-level leadership. She led global teams responsible for experiences ranging from intimate C-suite gatherings to conferences for tens of thousands, managed multimillion-dollar budgets and worked alongside Salesforce’s C-suite, executives from some of the world’s leading companies, professional athletes, celebrities, creative teams and agencies.
“I learned early in my career to start with the why,” Porter said. “You have to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and why it matters. From there, you can build the goals, bring together the right people and create the process to get there.”
Years later, Porter would recognize how much of what made her successful in her career — caring deeply about the vision, assembling the right team, managing budgets and timelines, anticipating details and building trusted relationships wasn’t all that different from what she had watched her father do in his own career.
When Porter joined Buckingham Resources, she stepped into a business that had spent decades building its reputation through exceptionally crafted custom homes and trusted relationships. By then, the kid who once volunteered to build furniture with her dad had also managed two home remodels of her own from start to finish.
Over the past two years, Porter has applied her background in business operations, large-scale project management and communications to Buckingham Resources. Her days move between client proposals, project details, company operations and marketing — a range that may look different from producing a global event, but draws on many of the same instincts.
In custom home building, Porter has found a new expression of something she has valued throughout her career: understanding what matters most. Every client and every home is different. Bringing a vision to life means understanding what matters to the people behind it, then bringing together talented people with different areas of expertise around a shared goal.
Today, Porter and her husband are raising their two children in Bend, a place that shaped much of her own childhood. For Porter, there is something meaningful about raising her family in the same community where her father founded Buckingham Resources.
Throughout her career in sports, technology and now in construction, Porter has often found herself working in environments where women have historically been underrepresented. Yet she says her confidence in those rooms was shaped long before she entered them.
She watched her mother build a career in technology sales throughout the 1990s and 2000s, often as one of few women in the room. That example was reinforced throughout Porter’s career by mentors, both women and men, who invested in her, challenged her and helped shape the way she leads projects and teams today.
“I learned early on that you don’t know what you don’t know,” Porter said. “But my parents also taught me to trust myself, own what I bring to the table and know that I deserve to be in the room because I’ve worked hard to get there.”
What once looked like very different chapters of Porter’s career now feel far more connected. The industries changed, but the experiences and skills she gained along the way became part of what she brought to each new opportunity.
It’s a perspective Porter hopes to pass along: trust what you’ve earned, stay curious about what you haven’t learned yet, and leave room for where both might take you.
“I hope my story inspires someone to stay curious, believe in what they bring to the table and be open to where their skills might take them,” Porter said. “Sometimes the most exciting possibilities are the ones you haven’t imagined yet.”
