My story is kind of unconventional. My original plan was actually to go to medical school, so I actually got accepted to medical school and before I actually started school, I ended up having lunch with a friend of mine who was already in medical school, and we just had a casual conversation and one of the things you threw out there. He didn't mean to change my life, but it did change my life. He asked me what were the things that I studied or what were the things I read about when I didn't have to read anything and then it got me thinking like none of that had to do with medicine ever. I only studied medicine because I had to and kind of being from a Korean household kind of Asian, there's some pressure really to become a doctor or a lawyer like that's what you become so that's what I was always going to be. At that point, I decided to switch. I didn't know what I wanted to do at first and so, I dabbled with a lot of different things, a lot of different areas for the first time in my career, really trying to explore what it was that I wanted to do. During my MBA program, I ended up taking a class, an entrepreneurship class, and I found my passion there. The passion was in the creation of new things and so, whether it's creating new projects, whether it's creating a new marketing campaign or a new business, that's really where my passions kind of came alive. I ended up starting my own business, and weirdly enough I actually was a fulltime blogger for about five years and so that's how I got into the marketing role, was being a blogger. Then I went to a local news station to be their social media director. I've got recruited to be their director of digital marketing for an ad agency here in Utah and then lastly with my current position, I ended up becoming the VP of marketing over at TAB Bank. So in a nutshell, that's kind of my story.

My scope is everything that deals with marketing. So all of the decision makings, any go-to-market strategies and trying to understand various products that we sell really when you boil it down to it, there are four key areas. You have your products, you have your channels, you have your model and you have your market and really it's trying to find alignment across all of them. Everybody talks about product-market fit, but you have product channel fits and all of that stuff. So really my goal is from a day to day thing is like, How do we figure that out? How do we figure out the channels that will help us get to the right people at the right time and influence people in the right way? So originally, that's kind of the day to day and one of the things I really wanted to do is when I first started at my current position, marketing was basically a fulfillment center so the team like the executive team would just say, Hey, marketing do this and we did that. We weren't really an integral part of the overall strategy. When I came here, that was actually one of our big push is to go beyond marketing and to have a seat at the table, being able to help guide the overall direction of the bank as a whole so when you include that scope, our scope actually becomes wider than just marketing in general. So we're working and strategically aligning ourselves with the product team, with customer service, like basically the whole customer journey from starting to end so that we can help influence and have those conversations as to how best to align the overall business goals with the marketing goals. In terms of weekly hours, it really just fluctuate. So some weeks I work traditionally 40 hours a week and some weeks, I'm working 60-70 hours a week. It just really depends on the workload. Travel is kind of similar. Typically right now, during the conference season, we usually travel quite a bit and so between me and my team we are traveling quite a bit but February, March, April, we're probably traveling about maybe 25% of the time. But outside of that, we actually don't have too much travel which I like. I don't actually like to travel too much, so it's actually my position at TAB Bank, actually is a really good work-life balance so, like, today I'm moving. So I'm just at the house and able to do other things but what ends up happening is like later tonight I got stuff to do at work, so I'll do that, it's really nice work-life balance.

Our marketing tech stack is just crazy. Like we have so many software that we utilized in our tech stack. But I mean, when you're boiling it down, for me, primarily we use those tools for analytical purposes and trying to understand basically what's happening with our customers like, what is their interaction with us? What are their experiences and looking at the data to help us tell the story that we don't understand and help us automate and making sure that thing doesn't fall through the cracks. So from that standpoint, I think probably my favorite tool right now is Marketo just because we actually use it for a variety of things, not just email marketing, but we use it for our whole ABM strategy, which is account-based marketing. It allows us to do lead scoring very well. Whenever we're looking at any software or tool, what we're really trying to find this, how easy can we gain information that it's supposed to be telling us in an efficient manner so that we are doing more than just observing and that we're actually pulling insights from the data. It's been my experience, almost all software tools that are out there, they're all pulling from the same data sources they just present it differently so when you're looking at those tools, basically, it's like, How can we get the information that's there, put it in an observable format and then pull insights from there? If I were to pick one, I'd say Marketo, we use that all the time especially integrating it with Salesforce.