Long road leads to dating business

Barnes

In November, she launched He’s For Me. And on Friday, with the help of the Austin Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, she’ll quietly cut the ribbon on the company’s downtown offices (the location is not public, to protect the confidentiality of clients).

She’s already scouting personnel for branches in Dallas and Houston.

“I kept thinking: Why hasn’t anyone done this?” she says. “It’s such a good idea, it must already exist.”

A farm work ethic

Shaklee (pronounced SHACK-ly like the vitamin company) comes to her new calling with a history of drive and accomplishment.

The daughter of a diesel mechanic who returned to farming wheat in northwest Oklahoma and a bank manager in Oklahoma — her parents divorced when she was 3 — Shaklee signed up for every activity at her Jet, Okla., high school. Not just 4H, but speech, theater, yearbook and basketball, even though she had never dribbled a ball before her freshman year.

“In order for us to have a basketball team,” she says of her senior class of 14 students, “everyone had to show up.”

She set her sights on broadcast reporting early on, then studied at Oklahoma State University while working her way through school and driving three hours to serve in a weekend internship as a reporter with KSWO.

“Needless to say, I’m good at time management,” she says. “I was used to working hard, getting your business done, keeping up your grades up and moving on.”

She took every reporting assignment at the station, including rooftop coverage of a homecoming parade. Upon graduation, she chose between starting jobs in Roanoke, Va., and Amarillo.

“My $5 got me to Amarillo,” she says. “That’s what I had in the bank when I graduated.”

Soon at KFDA, she was named a late-night segment anchor. Her very first interview was with State Sen. Teel Bivins , an expert in finance and education. A year later, the late senator offered her the job of district director to look after constituents’ concerns.

When she put him off, he offered to double her meager reporting income. She decided to call the two-year commitment her “political science course.” She stayed on for six years, supervising older workers and opening an office in Midland-Odessa when redistricting paired the cities with Republican Bivins’ Panhandle base.

“We really believed we were making a difference,” she says. “Bivins didn’t claim bipartisanship, but he could explain to his constituency why you need to reach across the aisle and compromise.”

After graduating Leadership Texas, a statewide women’s leadership program, Shakelee turned from politics to the nonprofit world. At that time, the $150 million Amarillo Area Foundation was trying to turn around a failing high school with a $5 million project.

“They promised families a golden gift of books, fees and tuition,” Shaklee says. “But they didn’t understand the family structure at home that sometimes meant the students were the first generation in high school, much less college.”

So Shaklee replicated a