- December 4, 2025
About 15 years ago, Melissa DeVriese was at a crossroads in her career.
She was a Washington, D.C., lawyer, but she had taken a detour on that path, and was staying part-time in Ormond Beach to help her father, Locke Burt, with a lawsuit impacting his company, Security First Insurance Co.
All along, she was planning to return to D.C., where she had graduated from Georgetown Law School, and where she had lived while working for the Department of Transportation as an appointee of President George W. Bush until 2009. While in Ormond, she continued to apply for jobs in D.C. Her cats still lived in D.C.
But the lawsuit was interesting, and she liked Ormond Beach. She was making friends here.
Could she be happy working for Security First permanently? Maybe she was willing to change her vision of the future and let go of the D.C. identity?
Being flexible is part of her path, DeVriese said at an interview this month, at the Security First headquarters in Ormond Beach, where she is now president.
To explain her mindset, she repeated the best advice she ever got, and that was from a mentor, when she was working in D.C.
D.J. Gribbin was her boss, general counsel for the DOT, and DeVriese asked him one day for advice. How did he plan out his career?
“Oh Melissa, you can’t plan out your career like that,” she recalls Gribbin telling her. “You just have to do a good job with every job you do, and be open to different opportunities as they present themselves to you, or as you find them.”
That resonated with her, along Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In.” DeVriese learned that you can’t look at your career as a ladder — it’s more of a jungle gym. In other words, you need to be willing to go left and right sometimes, even down, to keep progressing.
“Coming out of graduate school, people have a very linear view of how your career should go,” DeVriese said during her interview with the Observer. “But once you get out into the real world, you realize there are a lot of jobs you’ve never heard of, and that you might be good at. So you have to look for opportunities. If you do a good job with the job you have, while keeping your eyes open for opportunities and really stretching yourself, you’ll find you have a really interesting and rewarding career.”
DeVriese decided to move to Ormond Beach permanently and give up on that D.C. identity, in the end. She wasn’t as passionate about her job offers there, compared with what she was doing at Security First. So, she moved her cats, she rented out her D.C. home permanently. She lives here now, along with her husband, Erick DeVriese.
“I pivoted,” she said. “It was a big decision. But you have to evaluate yourself and figure out what makes you happy. You’re going to spend most of your waking life at work, so hopefully it’s something you enjoy — or at least don’t hate.”
She continued: “For successful people, it’s generally a mix of hard work and a little bit of luck and a little bit of timing. But you find they took whatever little bit of natural ability they had, whether it be art or speaking ability, and they combined it with hard work and looking for timing, looking for the opportunities that would help them.”
