Anita Adams runs a gutter business by day and is a shutterbug at night.

by Joanne O’Sullivan . photo by Matt Rose

As much as we’d all like to be well rounded, most of us tend to favor one side of the brain or the other. Left brainers are more organized, right brainers more creative. We all wistfully long for a little bit more of what the other side has got. Asheville native Anita Adams doesn’t have this problem. A super-organizer who once had her own administrative assistant business, she was snatched up by Gutter Helmet of WNC, a rain gutter protection business, 10 years ago. (The inventor of the Gutter Helmet, MIT grad Bob Demartini, lives in Flat Rock). As general manager, Adams oversees scheduling and gutter installation and supervises a mostly-male staff. In just her first three years, she helped take the company from $250,000 a year in sales to over $1 million.

But at heart, Adams is a creative type. Journaling since age 10, she has experimented with sewing, basket weaving, pottery and collage. “There’s always been a creative element in my life,” she says. Currently, she spends her free time writing, hiking and taking photographs. She’s traveled all over Europe photographing everything from people to landscapes to folk-art objects. At the urging of friends, she’s recently turned her photos into cards and started selling them at Flow Gallery in Marshall. “I have to keep one foot in the art world,” she says.

During the day, she gets a small dose of artistic freedom handling the company’s advertising, using some of her own photographs in ads. She’s also taken on the company’s social media, which appeals to both her organizational and artistic sides. But while some with an office job may pine to drop it all and run off to an art studio, Adams is happy to throw her creative energies into growing the business at Gutter Helmet. In her spare hours, traipsing through Italy, Germany or Spain, she can keep her eye on the artistic details she sees from behind her camera lens.