Shelli K. Spence grew up on a family farm in Porterville, California — a small agricultural town halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno. Her family had farmed the same land for over a hundred years. When she was seventeen, she walked into a military recruiting office on a dare with her best friend, and walked out with a life she had never imagined for herself.
Read the full guest story
Shelli K. Spence grew up on a family farm in Porterville, California — a small agricultural town halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno. Her family had farmed the same land for over a hundred years. When she was seventeen, she walked into a military recruiting office on a dare with her best friend, and walked out with a life she had never imagined for herself.
She joined the U.S. Army as an intelligence specialist. Her specific MOS was Morse code collection — a highly specialized signals intelligence role that she jokes "they probably don't even have anymore." She was stationed in South Korea for two years, spent time in Japan, and served the remainder of her enlistment on the East Coast outside of Washington DC. She arrived at basic training in New Jersey in winter — a farm girl from California who had never seen a real winter — and on the confidence course, hurt her arm partway through. When her sergeant said "Spence, I didn't think you were going to make it," she went back through it again. That moment, she says, was when she discovered something essential about herself: she could do whatever she decided to do. It has held for the four decades since.
After the Army, Shelli built a career in mortgage operations that spanned more than two decades — working her way through processing, into underwriting, into management, eventually becoming Senior Vice President of Operations at Doorway Home Loans, EVP and Chief Operations Officer at Affiliated Services Group, and ultimately a Senior Underwriter and expert resource at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She holds a HUD Direct Endorsement (DE) designation, a VA Non-Supervised Automatic Authority credential, and a Certified Residential Underwriter (CRU) designation from the Mortgage Bankers Association. She knows credit risk management, mortgage loan operations, and the regulatory infrastructure of government-backed lending at an expert level.
But the second chapter of Shelli's professional identity began in late 2023, when a friend suggested she get on LinkedIn. She started posting — tentatively, with only 500 connections, convinced nobody would see it anyway. What she found, instead of the expected indifference, was a platform that responded to authenticity, specificity, and voice. She began studying LinkedIn like an intelligence analyst: consuming expert content, attending LinkedIn Live sessions, investing in training, and building a framework for what actually works on the platform versus what simply looks like it should.
By April 2024, she had launched Shelli's Socials — a LinkedIn strategy and coaching practice — and within a year had grown her following to over 7,300. She has been featured in Forbes. She created the OPTIMIZE → ATTRACT → CONVERT framework for executives navigating professional pivots. She co-hosts LinkedIn audio room programs. And she continues to do all of this while working a full-time senior role — the embodiment of pursuing goals between nine to five rather than waiting for the perfect conditions to begin.
Shelli K. Spence's LinkedIn headline reads: "Positioning executives for their next move." That is exactly what she does — using the platform she taught herself to understand as the bridge between twenty years of career credibility and the next chapter that credibility makes possible.
She joined Mornings in the Lab's Center Stage from Reno, Nevada, with forty minutes before she had to leave for work.
