After a tragic accident, Anna Warren reinvented herself as a tech entrepreneur. And became someone who could tackle just about anything.

by Jess McCuan . photo by Brent Fleury

Anna Warren has never been a techie. The 41-year-old has never been particularly gadget-happy, nor was she spending an unusual amount of time, as a stay-at-home mom, checking email or surfing the web. “Last year, I didn’t even know the word code. What is code?,” says Warren, who launched a website, Jobbitz.com, last May. “It was a completely new realm.”

What she did know was that people in Asheville were looking for work. People she knew were, in some cases, living on just a few dollars—and there didn’t seem to be a good way to connect them with people who had work to offer. Craigslist, sure, but there are always plenty of scams there. The local papers are a good place to find full-time jobs, but Warren didn’t see a good place to post small jobs—things like yard work and babysitting and computer research help. Last spring she gathered up some tech-savvy friends and launched Jobbitz.com, a site where it’s free to post an odd job—say cleaning the gutters or chopping a tree. Since the site launched, Ashevilleans have posted more than 700 jobs, which Warren estimates have generated around $200,000 for the local economy.

It’s an interesting concept—a homegrown Craigslist for small jobs—but not yet a profitable one. That’s okay with Warren. She’s invested around $20,000 to get the site up and running, and soon she’ll roll out a version for the Charlotte area. She would, of course, like to make money on the sites eventually. But for now, running them has given her both a new challenge and a chance to help the Asheville community as much as she feels it has helped her.

In 2002, her parents, Carol and Cal Peddy, were killed in a plane crash after flying their small plane over Burnsville. It was one of the first fatalities at the Mountain Air Country Club, not far from where the couple owned a second home. Her parents were ages 60 and 59, and the accident shocked Warren’s family, most of whom grew up in south Georgia.

When she was killed, Carol had been in the process of buying a Lynchburg, Virginia, business, the Education and Research Foundation, which conducts clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. Warren, who was working as an occupational therapist in Atlanta at the time, decided to move her family to Lynchburg, step in and run the foundation with her sister, a dermatologist. Warren had never run a company before, and she had certainly never managed 20 employees. But her parents’ death had forced her to see the world a bit differently. “For some crazy reason, after their accident, I knew I was capable of doing more,” she says. “I had gone through that tragedy and was still standing.”

She sold out of the Lynchburg business in 2005 and moved back to Asheville in 2006 with her husband Britt and their three children, Ben, Tess and Caroline, now ages eight, six and five. In the past year, the Jobbitz project has given her a new identity in Asheville. “There are people who call me the Jobbitz lady,” she says, noting that she has to watch how she drives now that she has “Jobbitz” plastered all over her car. The recession has eased since she started the site, which means she hears fewer stories of people scraping together change to survive. But she still thinks there’s a need for a site like hers in Asheville. Even if there isn’t, she feels she’s made some sort of contribution. “It’s $200,000 that people have made,” she says. “If that’s my contribution to the economy, I’m okay with it.”