When Jennifer Bonner got her start in the water well drilling business, she wasn’t planning to make a career out of it. “It was actually just supposed to be a temporary, two-year job while I finished up my accounting degree,” she says. She had previously worked in the grocery business as a front-end manager and wanted to get her degree in two years instead of continuing part time. At that time, Rolling Prairie, Ind.-based Clearwater Well and Pump was looking for someone to fill an office role and Bonner thought it would be exactly the temporary fit she was looking for. She turned out to be wrong though.
While she was able to finish school and obtain her B.S. in accounting, she ended up falling in love with the drilling business and 21 years later, she’s still at it and has expanded her skillset to include field work. That’s not to say it wasn’t challenging at first. “In the beginning, honestly, it was [challenging] being a woman in the industry,” Bonner says. “There aren’t that many and it took a while for people to get comfortable with me going out doing estimating, and just me giving them the answers instead of having one of the guys call them back.” It took a few years to get completely comfortable, but now she says there is no difference at all with regard to how she is treated. “Once I started working full time here, it was just a unique opportunity and it turned out I really enjoyed it once I started getting into the work and understanding what was going on besides just sitting in the office answering the phone and taking care of the book part of it.”