Sandra Gail Motley, is a U.S. Army veteran, and founder of Purculate International, a boutique tech company located in Arlington, Virginia. ​​Purculate is the fulfillment of her lifelong dream of business ownership.

 

With pride, she has taken every opportunity to share the challenges and excitement of building the company with her eldest daughter Bischellya Garland while raising her three (3) minor children:  Douglas Jordan, Harrison Frank, and Olivia Mone't Grant, www.thenlp.weebly.com, who were ages 16, 13, and 10 years old at the time, and many others. In her spare time, she has spoken privately and publicly about the business and family on the east and west coasts at televised events. Her children accompanied her to  Techweek, City Council and Boards of Commissioners meetings to speak, Chamber of Commerce events and other venues. Passionate about minorities and women in tech, and especially after her daughter Olivia Monet, www.thenlp.weebly.com, was invited to spend the day with other young tech professionals at Google's Venice, California location, she had been more determined for inclusiveness in the tech industry. As a high school student, Olivia described it as "the experience of a lifetime!" My complements to Google for offering the opportunity for her to experience a day inside this multibillion dollar international corporation. I am also humbled that many software engineers across the world will never have that experience. I admire them for progressively considering and impacting the future! 

 

As a result, she has spoken with government officials, i.e., legislators, governors, and mayors, as well as educational institutions such as the U.S. Board of Education along with school districts (and affiliated schools), colleges, universities, and research institutes (public, private and government funded) about the opportunities and challenges for minorities in the industry. 

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Inspired by the arts, she ensured museums like the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gallery of Art, (and others across country) were informed of the company and how art impacted her tech designs. Expanding her reach for inclusivity, libraries such as the Library of Congress, The Martin Luther King Library and WestEnd Library in Georgetown/ Washington DC, The Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, (and other libraries in the capital region and Atlanta area) and others knew about the company, her children, the value of their "public" services, as well as additional barriers for access in the industry which also include age discrimination, military service penalties, and overemphasized educational inequalities for competitiveness. Historically, (some) minorities are welcomed to "share" or "donate" their vision for tech products for others to develop and capitalize on, while others are discouraged from its business opportunities, even as a professional who have worked in the field. 

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Over the years, Ms. Motley has routinely shared news, information, and updates of the sometimes-overwhelming journey of business building in the industry with her beloved family members (Motleys and Hairstons) which is book-worthy of successes, trials, tribulations, and speechless events they can "all" attest to since 2009. With the attacks on tech CEOs, the sabotage and attacks on their products and services, she has deliberately maintained communications with various federal, state, local, and county law enforcement agencies across the country from Atlanta/Fairburn, Georgia, to Danville, Virginia (her hometown), the  Georgetown/Washington DC, Rosslyn/Arlington, Virginia communities, including the State Department, Homeland Security, and other multi-national corporations. She is grateful to be surrounded by international embassies, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union offices, and many, many others, some of which she has also visited.

 

​​Realizing that her past professional experiences prepared her for business ownership, she has maintained contact with all of her former employers and cities of residence to share the business and updates on her children. Finally, it gives her great pleasure to share her business and vision, especially regarding the environment, with her military community at military bases (and those where her son Douglas Jordan Grant, U.S. Army veteran was stationed), BX/PX, Commissaries, Pentagon staff, American Legion, The Department of  Veteran Affairs, The USO, and various Veteran Service Organizations. She has maintained contact with the U.S. Department of Energy who sponsored the "Solar Ready Vets" training program and the Solar Energy Decathlon for colleges and universities worldwide. Since these agencies offer solar installation and management training, her goal was to recruit military veterans who often "sacrificed early college admissions" to serve the country first, to work with her on their Solar Energy products and installation. She endeavor to also inspire veterans to pursue business ownership in the clean energy industry and technology!​​​​

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Ms. Motley began her formal education pursuing a business degree (BBA) with a concentration in entrepreneurship; however, completed her education in Psychology. After working with teams of healthcare professionals in the field of mental health, she transitioned into tech. In tech, she worked with diverse teams of functional and technical software development professionals on various projects for over a decade. Her projects ranged from, native ideation conceived on the back of a napkin, to installation and upgrade of commercial out-of-the box solutions, to bolt-on custom solutions to support specialized internal business processes that varied in scale, complexity, and time. She gained valuable experience managing projects through the software development lifecycle using project management standards, from analysis and design through development, testing, change control, production, and production support with required resources. The Georgia Institute of Technology funded her formal training as an IT Software Development Project Manager, along with other related tech training in the field. The experience of working in the industry at Tech undoubtedly inspired her and contributed to her unique vision.

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Her children grew up in the tech environment and culture with many days spent in the office, especially during late evenings monitoring bug fixes and other performance issues after deployment of software into production. In addition to the aforementioned events, they experienced other tech, science, and business events designed for young people including robotics, software development summer camp programs for youth, business, science and engineering camps over summers.

 

The highlight and perhaps the inevitability of growing up while the business was being built, Olivia Monet Grant, the youngest spent many days in conference rooms with business executives supporting Ms. Motley. After meeting the interim CEO of Yellow Pages and watching her mom point out potential opportunities in tech for the company, and other events where she realized the value of this unique vision that shaped her vision and natural problem solving. Loving the experience and identifying ways in which young people could contribute as opposed to only consume the products, she informed her mom of her interest in tech and becoming CEO one day. Olivia assisted her mom with designing the websites while in high school. Later, she took classes in computer science and programming (Phython), however, as CEO she decided to pursue an MBA instead. 

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In her spare time, Ms. Motley enjoys city hiking exploring urban architecture, surrounded by art at museums and her love of French impressionist MONET and others. Most of all, she enjoyed writing "Jana the Jaguar" series with her daughter, Olivia Mone't Grant while she wrote "The Naughty Little Princess" series.​

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Ms. Motley resides at Riverplace West, 1111 Arlington Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia.

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