A Long Story About My Career

TLDR: I had a very unlikely career that was full of surprises and fabulous learnings.

My family would probably call themselves middle class, but I would say we were squarely working class in the best of times. My family was not big on college. I had an aunt that graduated when I was a kid, but neither of my parents nor their parents went to college.

My stepdad made a college fund for my brother who did not want to attend college. Most of the men in my family went into the military. My older step-brother went into the Coast Gard and my younger step-brother was a Marine and there is a long list of soldiers from other generations.

I don’t think anyone ever considered me a contender for college. I didn’t take it personally, it just isn’t what people did in my family. When I graduated high school, I wanted to go to college. I graduated in 1994 when higher-ed was really starting to sell this, anyone and everyone should take out a loan and go to college idea. I was met with light encouragement and some head scratches when I said I wanted to go.

I still don’t know what that was about. I suspect they knew I wasn’t ready. I was not. My parents treated me to a semester of college at Southeastern Louisiana University which I think at the time was about $1,200 a semester including the dorm. I lived in a dorm, made friends, drank too much, and worked a lot. I did not do well; I was not ready. That was the end of paying for college. Various family members helped me in some significant ways, but it didn’t work out until later. I could never figure out how to work enough to pay rent and study enough to do well in school. I should also mention that my social life was enormous and, I was terrified of school debt.

Instead of zipping through college, I worked. I worked a ton. I usually had at least two jobs at a time. I liked working, I liked the people, I liked how good I was at working and I loved having my own money. I traveled around, took road trips, hiked, and spent a couple of months in Europe with a backpack, some friends, and a very modest amount of money. I spent the early part of my 20s gaining perspective and learning. I learned how to change an alternator and disc breaks. I learned how to cook and worked with some great chefs in New Orleans. I learned how to get around a foreign country without knowing the language and I learned how to make just about anything work. Wherever I was employed, I was given small management roles because I was (and currently am) good at making ends meet against all odds.

When I was about 25 I told a friend that I felt like I couldn’t go any further without going to school but I didn’t know how to make it work. That friend took me to the University of New Orleans that day and helped me fill out FASFA forms for a pell grant and some loans. I took a leap of faith and took out the loans. He lent me the money for books until my money came in.

I finished college at 29. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I didn’t even walk in the graduation ceremony. I am now apologizing to my ancestors. It was totally a big deal.

A few weeks after I graduated my boyfriend (now husband) proposed, we got engaged and I entertained law school. Unfortunately, while I was studying for the LSAT, the next thing that happened was Hurricane Katrina.

The storm flooded my city and washed away my aspirations of anything. If you have never watched your hometown fall into the ocean so completely that you could watch the tide move in and out of neighborhoods while drinking up a 24-hour news cycle, I can tell you the experience is deeply discouraging.

Not only were we stuck in Florida without knowing if we had a home, we were scared for our friends and neighbors that couldn’t get out. We were watching the impact of racism and poverty and the reality of capitalism play out in front of the world while everyone criticized and blamed New Orleans. It was brutal.

I went home, fixed our house, planned a wedding, and had no idea what my next career moves were. The commodore from the New Orleans Yacht Club called me for a meeting. I used to bartend there just a few months prior while I was in school. He invited me out to see the place and asked if I would consider coming back to bartend while they worked on the place. I agreed, but it was very weird.

The club sits on the lakefront in front of the municipal yacht harbor flanked by boat houses and hundreds of boats. To get to the club, I had to drive around piles of boats that were tossed into the road by the hurricane. The part of town I lived in was slowly returning to relative normalcy since it was comparatively spared, but the lakefront looked like someone shook the neighborhood like a snow globe and left the pieces strewn out in an avalanche of chaos.

Every day that I worked, I stopped and bought ice for the cooler and gas for the generator and hauled it into the building that had visqueen where the windows used to be. In the winter, I added kerosene to my list to fuel the heater. It took me over an hour to set up and once I opened the bar, I served drinks and listened to people talk about their losses, which were substantial.

I want to take a pause and mention that thoughts of Hurricane Katrina do not conjure images of a devastated yacht club and that is good given the circumstances. In the scope of problems laid bare by that storm, this was small potatoes. However, these folks (let’s be honest, men) who rose up from humble beginnings and scratched out a good living owning small businesses towing cars or pouring concrete, becoming a big deal at the NOPD, or working offshore and saved their cash so that they could finally buy a boat and join yacht club suddenly found themselves with flooded homes and ruined boats. They were over-mortgaged, underinsured, and hanging on to their marriages. I developed compassion for these guys, their dreams, and their families. I also learned a ton from them while I watched them rebuild their lives.

Eventually, someone from the club introduced me to a woman that was running a bridal magazine for black women called “Weddings Noir”. It should be stated that the woman who invented this magazine, was not a black woman. She was a clever woman who noticed the opportunity to cater to women who were not being catered to. Before Katrina, New Orleans was significantly more than 50% black, so it should follow that at least 50% of the brides in the city also identified as black or at least certainly not white and these women were hard-pressed to see themselves on the covers of bridal magazines in 2005. Not only that but there were tons of local businesses that wanted to reach out to these women.

I took my fresh new marketing degree and got to work thinking about distribution and building an audience. I got our book carried in Barnes and Noble in New Orleans, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Orlando. We produced local bridal shows in those cities and sold local ads. These efforts dramatically improved our reach. Ultimately, I left the magazine because I thought the magazine content could not respectfully deliver value to black women without the supervision and guidance of a strong black female editor. A black bridal magazine run by white women was pretty offensive, even in 2005. Fortunately, the industry evolved without our help and I took a waitressing gig until New Orleans business started to normalize.

I found an ad (back in the newspaper days) for a job at Peter Mayer Advertising. I remembered one of my professors telling a class at UNO something like “All of you think you are going to work in advertising. There is only one agency in town worth working for and It’s Peter Mayer and they definitely aren’t going to hire all or even half of you.” I don’t imagine that the students at Tulane were treated to such an encouraging talk.

I did not want to work in advertising, but it seemed stupid to not apply for the job since it was oh-so desirable. I was hired by the only person that I think would have hired me. She was a raised-working-class mid-westerner that was married to the IT guy. I later discovered that many or most people got in the door by knowing someone, knowing someone’s dad, or having a sorority sister in the company. No shade to Peter Mayer, it is a very different company now, but that was the environment back then.

I loved working there and I had a great deal of respect for the real Peter Mayer and his sons that ran the company. When you work for a company that is so well regarded in a relatively small local industry, it feels like there is no other job or company that could matter as much or be as great. I learned something every day at Peter Mayer. I was still a recent college grad, but I did have a lot of years of work experience under my belt and I knew how to make myself indispensable. I asked questions even if I was afraid of looking dumb, I took notes on what to google when I got back to my desk and I volunteered for stuff I didn’t know how to do until I knew how to do everything. After one year I received the largest percentage pay increase in the company’s history (which was still less than I made as a bartender at a broken yacht club) and was adopted by the interactive division of the company.

I had a ton of titles and a ton of roles during my nearly ten years at the company, but I was always close to the creative. I worked closely with creative directors. I facilitated creative reviews. Eventually, Peter Mayer added a strategy team and I diligently kept my eye on the strategy ball as we integrated this discipline into the team. My facilitation became much more structured. I figured out how to get everyone to say what needed to be said to make sure the work was good.

Making sure all of the necessary things get said has become a hallmark of my work. I became so good at it and so natural that people began to rely on it explicitly recognizing that is what I was doing. I did struggle though. I mostly struggled to make myself visible in a significant way. I understood the value of my contributions. and I definitely had the support of a handful of people who understood my value, but I never quite knew how to state my value in a way that made me feel recognized. Not feeling fully recognized made me feel bitter and defeated so I moved on.

I am glad I moved on because I learned new things. However, when I look back at this experience I think it is such a shame that I didn’t have a mentor to give me some perspective or coach me on feeling empowered.

Something I want to include in this story is how I feel about Peter Mayer. I was talking to the (relatively) new CEO of Peter Mayer last year about employer branding. It occurred to me that Peter Mayer worked to cultivate a brand as an employer that relies on its reputation as a great gulf coast agency that treats the team like family. What I think their actual value is to employees, the reason why people should work there is that anyone who works at Peter Mayer for 2 or more years, will exit that job with a roster of some of the most gifted ride-or-die allies that you will carry with you throughout your career. I left Peter Mayer eight years ago and would not hesitate to contact any of my former colleagues for insight on a project.

My next role definitely over-indexed on self-empowerment and self-direction. Agency Pure was a small operation led by a man with a very impressive New York City pedigree. He is an ad man that way that Don Draper or the real Peter Mayer were ad men. He is still a friend and I still love workshopping ideas with him. One thing I appreciated about working at Pure is that anybody could do anything as long as it was good. There were truly no lanes in those days.

I did so many things at Pure that when I recount them, I have to double-check myself. I was able to put a functional structure in place that is still working and the company has tripled its billings and its staff since I left in 2019. When I left, I organized a kanban board in Asana called “What Jacqui Does” that had everything from passwords to protocols documented and I was told a few months ago, that it is still in use.

I am proud of the infrastructure that I built at Pure. I was able to implement a large host of ideas that the bureaucracy of Peter Mayer could not support at the time. I was able to gain confidence in my thinking. Honestly watching how well my planning stood the test of time leaves me with more confidence. However, I don’t think that the work I did in operations was my most significant contribution, I think my contribution to the creative work was as important.

Since I was not pressured to stay in my lane at Pure, I had full permission and frankly, expectations to weigh in on creative and strategy. Working at Pure I honed my ability to give compelling, digestible, and actionable feedback that respected both the creatives that made the work and their unique processes. I was invited to present and explain things to clients. I was a critical part of every pitch and I labored over writing good briefs.

My years at Pure were some of the most fun I have had in my career. There was so much learning and so much testing of my skills and so much development of my confidence. I will always be grateful for that opportunity. There were two things that made me leave Pure. The first was that I could not give what I needed to the company and parent the way I wanted to. The second reason was that I found myself working on a few projects that were not in alignment with my big-picture values and I was feeling compromised. The company was simply not big enough and my role was not narrow enough for me to opt out of working on certain projects.
I left at the end of 2019 to take a break and recuperate from 13 years of advertising.

My plan was to teach yoga until I figured out my next move but the pandemic had other plans for me. Right after we all went inside to shelter in place, I picked up a producer role at another local agency called Trumpet. My Trumpet story is short. I was not a good fit for them, nor were they for me. It was a short engagement. I learned that there is no shame in noticing when the fit isn’t great leaving on a good note. I wish those guys well. There are some talented folks over there and also some great clients.

When I left Trumpet, I figured I would just get a super small job with a ton of flexibility so I could homeschool my kiddo for the year and a half that schools were closed. I found a job listing for a project manager at Job Portraits which was an employer brand agency. I didn’t know what employer branding was and I don’t think they had a sense of what project management was.

I was offered a job as a project manager at Job Portraits for a fraction of my previous salary. This was the second time in my career I took a substantial pay cut for an opportunity to grow in a new direction. I have no regrets and recommend it to anyone that can afford it for the right occasion.

I began learning about employer brand and how it is created. It was different than creating a consumer brand in a few ways but not that much different. The main difference was that the team at JP had far more journalistic chops than brand sensibility. I actually loved this about Job Portraits! The idea that the truth would compel and persuade is deeply aligned with my own beliefs. The opportunity that I pinpointed for development, was that the truth has to be packaged, in a concise and attractive way and put in the path of people who are looking for it.

This is an indulgent non-sequitur in an indulgently lengthy piece, but I am going for it. I once went to one of those ruby mines in the smokey mountains with my family. We bought a bucket of mud and we panned for treasure. We found some obvious things like amethyst and rose quarts and that was exciting enough for us to be pleased about our thirty-dollar investment. However, we realized that we were tossing out dozens of sizeable rubies and emeralds because we didn’t know what to look for. Someone eventually showed us the error of our ways. I think at its best, good communications help people find what they are looking for when they are not trained to find it. This is especially important when it’s the people who are looking for the truth. In my industry, there are gazillions of smart, creative, people working hard to make things that people never dreamed of needing or wanting to look so much more compelling than the truth. We need people with this skill set to start working for humanity’s better angels.

So… Job Portraits…

I got busy doing the kind of systems things that I am good at. There were several different project management tools that nobody was using well, and I got that in order. I created tools, protocols, workflows, and all kinds of interesting and wildly effective things that deserve their own case study outside of this story.

A few months into Job Portraits the founders decided to restructure the company. The company had been trying to develop a type of turnkey product that was relatively inexpensive and useful for recruiters. The founders decided to turn that product into a platform called Before You Apply (BYA). The idea was that BYA would become the parent company that housed Job Portraits. I was named the Director of People and Ops.

The work I did in that role was really helping to create processes, hire and onboard people, and keep things rolling at Job Portraits. I also had an opportunity to assist just a little with the fundraising efforts. I didn’t give too much help to be honest because I never fully aligned with the BYA founders about how to market the company. In hindsight, I can notice that I was struggling with an unreasonable lack of confidence in asserting my point of view in the tech space. I understood that BYA was not clearly communicating its product or its position in an industry that is full of ambiguity.

These fundamental marketing elements are kind of elementary to me but did not seem to be important in the tech/VC arena. What I know now is that basic marketing concepts were important and I should have called bullshit. Instead, I doubted myself and focused on something I did understand, which was Job Portraits, the established agency that found itself under the umbrella of a start-up.

While BYA was working to get funding and prove its value, Job Portraits was generating revenue and getting more solid with the new structures I put in place. It was not perfect but it was building strength. The only thing was, everyone on the Job Portraits side of the company was feeling like their great work and great reputation was getting lost under the new company. I was feeling like these two business models were incompatible and I was worried that Job Portraits might not survive and I didn’t understand BYA enough to bet on it. I lobbied for the split of the two companies and was invited to be the CEO of Job Portraits after the companies split.

I will resist the urge to be cool about this. This was a very big deal to me. I was thrilled and had no chill whatsoever about this becoming the CEO of Job Portraits. I loved the founders, the employees, the work, and the clients. I have never wanted a company to succeed so badly in my life. I knew that helping this company survive was a long shot, but I thought I could do it and I knew it was worth it.

I did so many things in my time as CEO of Job Portraits. I created a brand for Job Portraits, redefined our products, managed our costs, hired a fractional CFO and restructured the staff. I improved our client retention by leaps and bounds because we had offerings to sell our clients (that were relevant ) and we had a new account management team to sell them. I contextualized the employer brand life cycle. With the help of an outrageously industrious and dedicated team, I created a point of view about developing an employer brand from the inside out and a clear methodology about how to do it. When I tell you, it was good, I mean, the work was really really good. That made it extra hard when the company did not survive.

We came extremely close to making it, but the instability in the tech industry ultimately tanked our pipeline and we did not have the cash to wait it out. We had to close. It was always my goal to get us into other verticles but it takes time to make these kinds of moves and I ran out of time.

I developed a vision of employer branding that I still think is very unique. In my view, the act of employer branding is ultimately the act of evaluating a company and the people in it. We take a look at the collective goals, behaviors, and views of that company. Then, we take a look at what similar companies are doing saying, and offering. Although I am skipping many steps, we finally use all of this information and some creativity to help the company commit to a set of pillars that hold up the culture of the company and effectively make promises to maintain the culture of the organization. This is what helps these companies attract, hire and retain talent. When companies attract, hire, and retain the right talent for their mission, we get stronger and longer-lasting relationships between industry and workers. Improving the lives of workers is an outcome that matters to me in a very deep way.

Job Portraits was doing a solid business helping tech companies attract, hire and retain software engineers and other knowledge workers. I think that is good, but I always wondered what it would be like to do this at scale for someone like Wal-Mart who employs over two-billion people. I had fantasies of working with hospital networks that are being crushed by high turnover. I also thought that businesses with franchise models could have really benefited from this work.

So, when Job Portraits closed, I had to grieve hard. I had to grieve my staff, my clients, my ego, and my vision of the impact I hoped to have. I spent a couple of months trying to wind down the business and rehome clients and employees. Much of that was a waste of time, but there were good learnings. Then I half-heartedly did some project work. I finally decided to stop and listen to the clock tick and my heart beat and my lungs breathe and for the first time, I was able to pick up and drop off my kiddo every day.

I cried a lot, walked my dogs a lot, and made a bunch of pottery. People keep asking me what I am doing now and I say things like “Today I made some bowls”. I have been legitimately busy making pots, firing, glazing and firing again. It takes a whole day to fire the kiln and it is super-exciting. I love opening the kiln because it’s a surprise every time. I have an idea of what something will look like when it’s done, but there are all these steps that make it hard to appreciate the effort until the process is complete. I load up the kiln full of pieces I have put so much effort into and then I trust that the time and heat will transform all of my efforts into something interesting, functional, and beautiful.

It has been almost six months since Job Portraits closed and I have mostly taken this time for myself. It feels a lot like the waiting that happens when I load the kiln and wonder what will come out.

In my work life, I have done many cool things, worked with great people, overcame great odds, won big, and lost big. During all of that time, it was hard to tell how much I was growing. I was never still long enough to see how incredible the journey has been. I am just now starting to find something that will light me up again and I am so thrilled to find out what it will be.