My Experience In Real Words
RESUMES ARE THE WORST. I HAVE NEVER MET A RESUME THAT I LIKED. I HAVE COME TO ACCEPT THEIR ROLE, but nobody’s WORK AND EXPERIENCE COULD BE meaningfully summarized IN A BULLETED LIST. I HAVE A TRUE AFFECTION FOR WORK. NOT Just MY WORK, BUT OTHER PEOPLE’S WORK AS WELL. I HAVE SPENT SO MUCH OF MY TIME AND ENERGY AT WORK, IT FEELS REALLY GOOD TO HONOR THAT EFFORT WITH THIS WRITING. HERE IS HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN. THIS LIST STARTS FROM THE MOST RECENT AND GOES DOWN TO THE OLDER WORK.
CREATIVE OPERATIONS AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
ZANDER MEDIA
SAN FRANCISCO (REMOTE)
FEBRUARY - PRESENT
Zander Media is a small but innovative video content agency. I have enjoyed a helpful peer relationship with the Zander team and I joined in February to provide support for the creative team, and business development.
The beauty of the Zander team is that they are very skilled and inspired. I saw an opportunity to leverage their ability to make content creation easy and accessible. On arrival, we worked on developing strategic content packages that could help their clients stay active across necessary social platforms.
CEO
Job Portraits Inc
SAN FRANSISCO(REMOTE)
2021- 2022
Job Portraits is an employer brand agency that originated in San Fransisco and served clients in the bay area and Silicone Valley. Currently, we have employees and clients all over the world. I became the CEO of Job Portraits in the summer of 2021and I have the honest-to-God joy of working with some of the most brilliant, kind, and emotionally intelligent people I have come across. I love work and working and I have a lot of pride in the work I have done, but leading this group of people doing this work is the most satisfying moment of my professional life so far.
Since becoming CEO (mid-2021), I have redefined our mission and vision, developed a leadership team, radically changed our branding and communications, and restructured much of our operations. We are on the brink of switching from an in-bound only sales model, to actively marketing and creating outbound sales programming. Our infrastructure is now ready to scale to meet demand.
It is a delight to have conversations daily about the importance of the employer/employee relationship. The time people spend at work is important and necessary. The opportunity cost of that time is immeasurable and could be represented by so many things like walking in the woods, playing with pets, learning an instrument, meditation, raising and playing with our kids, playing video games, spending time with our parents, or basically any human activity that we forego in order to make a paycheck. It would be really excellent if the decision to participate in the economy did not deplete us so substantially that it eliminated our ability to do all of those human activities. I believe that there are big conversations to be had around preserving the human part of human capital as an ingredient of industry and a healthy economy. My access point to this conversation is in the realm of employer branding, where I get to encourage companies to consider telling the truth about what they need from an employee and what they will give.
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS + PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Job Portraits / Before you apply
SAN FRANSISCO(REMOTE)
2020-2021
In the late summer of 2020, I found myself exiting the advertising industry for the second time. I was thinking of doing, what many women were called (or forced) to do and leave the workforce for the remainder of the pandemic. Managing a family through an exhausting pandemic with no end in sight was difficult and I was discouraged from my last engagement. Someone sent me a Linked In Post that said something like “looking for a project manager that is comfortable with ambiguity”. I was intrigued and applied. I really liked the people and what the company was doing. Job Portraits was an employer brand agency that was being run by its founders who were spinning up a start-up at the same time. They were at a unique moment in their company and they were trying to understand what a project manager could do for them. I liked the owners so their company so much that I agreed to take on a project management role. We all agreed the project management role was a small job given my experience, but I was enthusiastic about working with the team and learning more about the world of employer branding. We agreed that I would help them out for about a year by building a project management discipline in their agency and then staffing it before my planned exit.
In the months after I was hired, I got deep into the weeds of their operations, made several recommendations, and implemented new systems. The name of the company was changed to Before you Apply (the name of the platform the agency was incubating) for a few months. On my recommendation, the platform separated from the agency to become its own company. This decision allowed one of the founders to step away from the agency and follow his passion to develop the platform. At the same time, I was put in charge of managing the agency. I decided to stay with Job Portraits and was named CEO.
SR. PRODUCER
TRUMPET Advertising
NEW ORLEANS
APRIL - AUGUST 2020
Trumpet Advertising is a well-respected agency in New Orleans. I began working at Trumpet during the pandemic and was given the opportunity to collaborate with great people and serve amazing clients.
This is clearly the shortest engagement on my resume and I don’t mind saying that is because it wasn’t a good fit. Culture is important and Trumpet has a strong vibrant culture that people were pretty well bought into and I felt like a fish out of water right away. I hated this feeling and the worst part is, I am sure they never saw my best work. I decided to honor both the agency and myself by acknowledging this misalignment and creating an exit strategy. This was a great lesson and I have a lot of gratitude for the Trumpet team for helping me learn it. I have since recommended people to Trumpet and Trumpet to businesses.
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
PURE
NYC + NEW ORLEANS
2015 - 2019
PURE is a progressive ad agency born in New York and relocated in New Orleans. In 2015 I was hired to redefine an operational structure that would support an emerging business model that provided on-demand talent for its clients.
This Business model was (and is) special and attractive to me. In 2014 and 2015 I was noticing a shift in the way work was being assigned to the agency I was working at. Clients were moving away from big retainers with single agencies of record and looking to distribute work and projects to multiple agencies with specific competencies. This trend was making it increasingly challenging to forecast work and staffing needs. We were also challenged to have the right talent in place for key projects. It was obvious to me at the time, that agencies were going to have to become more dynamic in every way in order to thrive.
In the 4 years I spent at PURE, I was able to create an entire operational platform that defined how we communicated, calculated, and produced work. I researched and implemented technologies that were easy to adopt and would scale with our success. I built, policies, systems, and protocols around the technology. The sum of these efforts resulted in a very connected and transparent work environment that encouraged collaboration between a variety of professionals with different offerings, in remote locations.
Internally, I changed our approach to creating scopes of work that both opened the process up for more input and streamlined our workflow. I created a quick onboarding process for contractors and a few self-service platforms for submitting contracts and estimates. I designed a complex self-updating system that allowed us to evaluate real-time metrics based on remote inputs. It’s fair to say that nobody could ever love this creation as much as I did, but everyone loved having their questions answered quickly.
In order to do this well, I had to be deeply entrenched in all projects. I managed the vast majority of our projects and teams. I was a key contributor to creative strategy development and I did a significant amount of client management.
I was also responsible for staffing projects which meant I invested a substantial amount of time networking and searching for talent. Once we contracted with our talent, I was their main point of contact. I managed their total experience as a contractor from creating a contract and immersing them in a team and a workflow to submitting invoices and getting paid. Having a strong and diverse pool of talent was a critical element of our success.
Director of Creative Operations
PETER A MAYER ADVERTISING
NEW ORLEANS
2014-2015
The Director of Creative Operations position was one of my invention. I spent several years working on a very large client as a producer and a project manager. The team that serviced this client comprised more than half of the agency. What I realized is that as a project manager, I had the responsibility of assigning work and no ability to influence the team that I was relying on to do the work. The team of project managers that I lead were all very frustrated.
I began to take notice of the impediments to getting high quality creative work on deadline. What I noticed is that creative leadership is very different from operational leadership. The Creative Directors were doing a great job at helping the creative staff grow creatively, but they did not have the information to holistically direct their work . There were 3 Creative Directors that had a combined staff of about 30 direct reports. They had no way to understand the global workload and how it was distributed. They were missing out on critical opportunities to weigh in on important work. Furthermore, they had only their own very subjective opinions to evaluate their employees, which due to the nature of the relationship between a Creative Director and a creative staff member, is not particularly well informed. There were no metrics available to illuminate a discussion about met deadlines, internal client satisfaction, and general quality of performance.
As far as the creative staff was concerned, there was nobody protecting their time. It is very difficult to make your deadlines when you spend 6 hours a day in meetings, even if those meetings are informative (and they certainly weren’t). There was nobody making sure that their hardware and software was up to date. There was nobody to track vacations to make sure that everyone wasn’t given off at the same time, or that the same people weren’t given preference, or that we weren’t going to have an empty house during a big project.
The creative staff was desperate for an ally to help them negotiate their deadlines and interface with the myriad of people who wanted work from them. Every minute an art director spends explaining that they don’t have what they need to do a project, is time they are not spending making deadlines. They could not prioritize work either, they had no view of what was the most important.
I developed methods, systems and protocols that provided utility, intelligence, and communication between groups and inherently created data. This information helped us consider performance from a quantitative perspective and also it helped us forecast staffing needs.
SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER
PETER A MAYER ADVERTISING
NEW ORLEANS
2014-2015
I fell into the role of Project Manager somewhat reluctantly after the agency did some restructuring. This restructuring merged the interactive division of the agency, where I was previously, with the rest of the agency. There was a noticeable lack of knowledge regarding digital projects and digital workflow. As one of two people that was brought over from the digital side, I was able to lead the group into integration.
During this time, I learned the value of managing up down and all around. There were bridges that needed to be built in every direction. By the end of my term in this position I was co-leading a strong group of project managers that I was extremely proud of.
Not only did I work on bringing many of my peers up to speed with digital projects, I supervised high-volume print work. While doing this I devised ways to streamline work, while implementing quality assurance protocols and provided real-time tracking methods and status reports.
I worked with every single department to solve problems with process and communication. I reviewed, recommended and implemented new technology including an ERP system and a digital proofing tool. I also sold in #slack as a new tool and introduced it with working protocols.
I was on committees whenever there was one. I redefined file management guidelines and assisted the Art Buyers in creating a tracking system.
For some reason, I was asked to help redesign the bathrooms. I had no talent for this and don’t really know why I was asked. That said, they turned out pretty good. I am just saying…I pretty much did anything that needed doing.
DIGITAL PRODUCER
PETER A MAYER ADVERTISING
NEW ORLEANS
2008-2011
When I was first hired at Peter Mayer, I took the job with a substantial pay cut. I would not recommend this to anyone now, but I did it because I thought I would quickly prove myself valuable. Lucky for me, my well placed faith worked out. After working an entry-level position for a little over a year, i was selected to become a digital producer.
I was so very proud of this transition for many reasons, but looking back I can tell that it changed the trajectory of my whole career. I had way more promise and chutzpah than actual knowledge or skill. I worked my tail off and had incredible mentors that offered me an unbelievable amount of support.
While I was learning the anatomy of a website and how to build it, I was learning to take responsibility for every single detail of the digital work I was producing. All the while new technologies were constantly emerging. Software was moving quickly from critically necessary to obsolete. We went from talking about megabytes to terabytes in the course of a year. I had to research new technology and new disciplines constantly. We were collectively, as a team, learning new development languages, strategies, google analytics, email deployment systems, content management systems, and third party media services.
There was never a dull moment. During this time, is when the mindset of constant evaluation and iteration became deeply engrained in my being. There was a culture in the interactive division of hard work, engagement and whimsy. We were always working a little bit outside of our edges. We were always making magic happen. It was a delight.
TRAFFIC COORDINATOR
PETER A MAYER ADVERTISING
NEW ORLEANS
2006-2008
The first job I ever had in advertising was a traffic coordinator. It was entry-level and not enviable, but I was so happy and lucky to have this job. I took it because I know it was the beginning of something great.
At its core, the traffic department keeps the trains running on time. I made sure the work got assigned and finished and delivered on time. There were certainly nuances to it. I had to learn to prioritize my own work to make sure everyone else was working as quickly as possible. I had to punch above my weight and convince people to do work when I had the lowest status in the building. I learned to be very casual and sort of unamused with status. It was essential to my success that I could ask anyone for anything and expect unhindered cooperation. This perhaps is my secret superpower.