University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

St. Olaf College

Managing Director at Porchlight Book Company

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

I believe my job is to make 800-CEO-READ a great place to work for employees and a consistently high performing customer service organization for our clients, authors, and our partners in the publishing industry. I encourage and direct collaboration and employee development. Big picture, I identify the organization's immediate and long-term objectives, suggest and direct enhancements to existing programs, determine staff and resource allocation, and formulate and monitors specific strategies to achieve them.

Porchlight Book Company

Managing Director

I read, recommend, and write about business books.

Curator, KnowledgeBlocks

I read, review, recommend, promote and write about business books.

Writer/Editor, Creative Team

Sally Haldorson is a 25-year veteran of bookselling and a live-long lover of books. Her first job post-college (English degree, of course) was working for the now-defunct B.Dalton and then supervising at their short-lived children’s store P.B.Pages. After attending graduate school in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she returned to bookselling, taking a job in 1997 at Schwartz Business Books. The Schwartz bookselling legacy had begun in 1927 as a printing press in the back of a hair salon, and in 1984, in addition to 9 brick-and-mortar stores run by Harry’s son, David, added bulk business books as a retail concentration, lead by Jack Covert.Over the past 21 years, Sally has worked her way through all aspects of the company— customer service, operations, accounting, marketing, and now management—, and helped guide the company through external industry disruptions such as Amazon, the roller-coaster economy, and the emergence of technology in publishing, as well as internal change as the family was forced to close the bookstore chain itself in the late 00s.Also during those years, she helped Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten write and publish the book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time with Portfolio now in its 3rd edition and having sold over 30,000 copies. She became General Manager of 800-CEO-READ in 2015.2019 has brought about even more change as Sally led a rebrand with new technological infrastructure to enable the company to contribute even more to the authors and publishes who bring great work into the marketplace of ideas. She manages a team of 17 employees and was named Chief Strategist in 2019.