Heather Silverio fondly remembers visiting her dad at work when she was a young girl.
Bill Thompson was a district manager for Best Buy at the time, and Heather and her sister loved to play Donkey Kong on the Nintendo 64 test stations at the stores. And when her parents gave her a car on her 16th birthday, Heather picked it up in a Best Buy parking lot in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now, Heather, 29, is following in her father’s footsteps. She has worked at Best Buy for 12 years and is now the general manager of Store 128 in Reno, Nevada — a location Bill originally grand-opened in 1999. (He’s now a senior vice president and territory general manager, overseeing all of the company’s West Coast stores.)
“I’ve always looked up to my dad, so to be at the same store he was at is pretty cool,” Heather said.
That wasn’t always the plan, though. She first joined Best Buy as a part-time cashier at Store 273 in Fairfax, Virginia, while attending nearby George Mason University. She studied global affairs in college and did an internship at a government organization, but she quickly realized that she didn’t have as much fun sitting behind a desk as she did on the Best Buy sales floor.
“Obviously, my dad was happy I got a job there during school, but it was never a hard sell or anything like that,” she said. “I just realized I got a lot of energy from working at Best Buy, and obviously it had worked out really well for my dad. I knew I didn’t want to leave.”
Heather became a general manager about a year-and-a-half ago, and she couldn’t be happier with how things worked out. She loves her job, and she has made a lot of great friends at Best Buy — she even met her husband while working with him in Fairfax (though he’s no longer with the company).
As a manager, Heather enjoys being able to work with her dad, and she aspires to emulate his leadership skills. Even today, some employees in Reno tell her about the influence Bill had on them years ago.
“He’s an inspiring guy,” she said. “I hope I can do that half as well as he does. That’s definitely something I try to aim for in how I interact with my team.”