I appreciate it. You know, I think that traditionally, you know, with specific traditional backgrounds and medical or law, there's a pretty specific way to get to where you need to be, Um, on a prescribed degree that you need to have in business. It's It's a little bit more general. And my path to where I am today was, you know, quite a journey. I started off with a degree from the University of Utah in computer animation. And, uh, that was all kind of started with blending together my interest in, uh, in art and background in art, but also my interest in technology and business. Um, as I worked, you know, through my degree, I actually did what was called a B. U. S degree. I propose that to the dean, and they approved a degree in animation, which I understand the growing now growing education pat there at the University of Utah. Um, basically, that introduced me to the idea of, you know, the way that business was intersecting with digital technologies. I left the University of Utah after I got my my bachelor's degree and started to work in consulting for digital technologies for small businesses. I worked with a lot of small companies putting helping them put together their websites, helping them with print on digital production, and even started dabbling in some Web analytics to help them to understand what was going on with their advertising. This was kind of pre, um, pre on nature. I'm not sure may have been around, but it wasn't the big thing that we know is Adobe today on DSO. I was using what at the time, some may remember was called Flash and I used Flash to write flash scripting to create basically forms to track advertisements that we were doing in in paid media. That was print at the time. So we would basically make an offer in the print media ad and client would go to a U. R L that was prescribed, which would bring up my flash form, which would basically intake their information. It would produce a campaign code and provide some basic reporting as to where this person came from. Which magazine they brought, you know, they came from Andi. Even we gathered like state information and demographic information on dso. In doing that, I started to really realize the you know, the world of digital analytics. Um, it was a few years later when I decided to go back to the University of Utah to get my masters of business administration, and I really focused on marketing and, um, marketing technologies and finance. I really wanted to make sure that I was I had both the technical, you know, in financial side covered as well as the marketing side. And so I did a lot of coursework in both of those places. Um, it was interesting as I as I left my my degree there, there was, you know, as I completed that degree on, I left the University of Utah again with my degree. It was right in the middle of the financial collapse, and times were very tough into. That was 2000 and 8. 2009 times were really tough. Finding a job was hard. I had, you know, my clients, my independent business, small business clients on the side that I was working with them throughout my entire bachelor's degree on sorry throughout my entire masters of business administration degree. But what happened was with the, you know, liquidity issues on Wall Street. Um there was. There was no liquidity for small businesses and small businesses closed one by one, about as quickly as you could turn the, you know, turn the page and all of my small business clients dried up. They all went. They all went bankrupt due to the liquid liquidity and lending issues on Wall Street. And I was found. I found myself without any clients to consult with or to help with any marketing activities, and it was really an upsetting time. It was very challenging. And as I did some introspect and decided, you know, to decide what I wanted to do next with my career, I decided to go back to school and because I've always enjoyed education and I applied for a degree at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, um, they had a degree that basically blended engineering psychology with engineering psychology with user interface design, which was just a really nice next step for me to be thinking about, you know, research and interface, design and development and that kind of stuff. It was called human Computer interaction was a masters of computer science and human computer interaction, and a lot of people ask me Well, why did you go back for another master's degree when you had an MBA Eyes? Because at the time, I wanted to go do that because I was expecting to apply for a PhD and I was going to do a PhD on DSO. I took the opportunity. They didn't have an opening in the PhD program, but they did in the Masters program. So I took the opportunity to to get into the master's program, and I started to work in that I was top of the class. Obviously, there was a lot of content that I had covered before in other classes, uh, master's work and philosophy that I was familiar with. But there was also a whole new litany of information in hard sciences that I'd never been, you know, coming from a and associates in I'm Sorry, a bachelor's degree in Science and in arts. There was a whole litany now, going into a master's of science that of information had never been exposed. Thio and my my brain was on fire statistics, and, you know, I'd learned just so much about statistics and, um, measurement and all sorts of things. Andi, I loved it It was awesome. Uh, it was I was in my last semester of my associates degree. I had a family of four Children at the time, and it was about Christmas, and I was realizing just how poor I waas from all the school that I was involved in. And I had a recruiter called me and say, Hey, I'm working on a contract for CNN dot com and you have got a phenomenal background. I'd really like to have you come and work with us, uh, to help launch the new CNN dot com application. It's not a full time offer, but it is a part time offer. It's perfect for the holiday season. We just need some extra help to push this delivery herbal across the line over the holiday. And, of course, um, I took the job. I was like, That sounds amazing. It sounds like I could probably balance this and my education. What I came to find out is that I couldn't balance that and my education. And so I ended up leaving the program about eight credits short of my master's degree in computer science at Georgia Tech, which is something that still haunts me today. I just basically have to finish one class in my in my in my senior project, essentially. But I loved my coursework at Georgia Tech. It was awesome and it gave me a lot of opportunity, a lot of vision. Heading into CNN dot com, I was exposed immediately. Thio, You know, a world of brands that were beyond my imagination. A few years prior, I was working with Anderson Cooper. I was working with, you know, the Heroes campaign. I was on the front, working on the front page and doing research, uh, and measurement of adoption for the front page, the home page of the new CNN dot com. It was about as big a thing as anybody could imagine, and I loved it. It was awesome. It was informative. It was challenging. Andi. I was learning just a ton, you know, drinking from the firehose from all of the great professionals that were around me. When the contract was over, I had basically been able to deliver help. Deliver the CNN dot com uh, home page. I did basically worked with the tool that was called User Insight Feedback Tool. It was a little plus sign that was in the corner of the website, and basically people could click on it and say, I can't find And so I would do qualitative analysis. I did a lot of Excel work data management from my skills that I picked up both at Georgia Tech and the University of Utah. From my great professors on, I did a lot of qualitative analysis on what, what was wrong in the experience. What I couldn't find. For example, you know, one of the feedbacks might be I can't find, but sub categories if I can't find could be I can't find this button because it's broken. It could be I can't find it because it's not where I expected to be, you know, it could be I can't find it because I haven't scrolled down or, you know, I don't know any number of things. So I tried to boil all those together, you know, and bubble those up to the surface so that we could drive some adoption. I went through in two weeks. I went through something like 20,000 comments me and me alone, surfacing and bubbling up commentary to my development team and to my user experience teammates so that that we could continue to drive adoption. And at the end of two weeks, we had completed that cycle. That development cycle not really cycle on it, and it was a grand success. And it's what we call CNN dot com today. Um, after that I assumed I would go back to school. I said, Thank you for the experience. This is great. I enrolled back in school and before school started again, I received another call from another recruiter saying, Hey, I got a recommendation for you Home depot dot com would like to talk to you, and I said, I think I need to finish my school And they said, I think it would be really, you know, a really good job. And they told me how much money was and I said, Wow, that is a good job. So I called. I called, and I ended up once again abandoning school and going to work for home depot dot com. Uh, at the University of Utah. I took a class and data management in my MBA coursework from one of the great professors there, and we did adobe analytics. Basically, implementation was what it was, and I So I had that adobe implementation background and experience. But it was only from the one class I took in my m B. I wouldn't say I was a master edit or anything, but I felt stronger about it, being that I had, you know, had some hard sciences and research background from Georgia Tech. So I I took the job. It was for an analyst, um, for Adobe Analytics at home depot dot com was very small team. There was a senior manager, there was a manager and there were two analysts on that was the team. And so when I got in there, we immediately started to take a look at their data. Look at their organization and I started pulling reports. As I pulled the reports, I realized that there were some and I looked at what they had pre built. There was some serious bias and error, you know, rational error in what they were trying to report on and what they were trying to relate and correlate and how they were driving insight from that. So, you know, based on the course work that we did at at University of Utah from the great Alvin Nash Kaushik. You know the book? Uh, Web analytics was Web analytics. Uh, hour a day. I basically dug into that and said, you know, how can we make this implementation better? And with some discussion with my senior leadership and with their senior leadership as a very junior analyst, over the course of the next 3 to 4 weeks, we decided the best thing to do would be to do a re implementation of the entire analytics package of adovia at home depot dot com. Um, and much to my surprise, Adobe was all about it. They said, yes. You have needed one for a long time. Well done. And they supported it. Our senior leadership brought in Eric from Eric. I forgot his last name. I'm sorry. I apologize, Eric, if you ever see this from analytics demystified, and he was our he was our consultant who walked us through our re implementation. And, uh, we had a really tremendous re implementation. We were able to deliver on all of our goals and within, you know, 3 to 4 months we had to completely re implemented or GTA upon which I started to use the application to build out senior leadership Wish list. Reporting C suite reporting. We built out the KP eyes deck. I was able to create a KPs deck that was reproducible almost instantaneously, based on the reports that we built in Excel and pre loaded into the into the PowerPoint slides. So all I had to do was basically open up a data table, refresh it, save it, and it would pull down those reports and populate the data tables in deck. And everybody was happy we could have our senior leadership KP I meeting on Monday mornings for the first time instead of on Tuesday or Wednesday. Um, I also produced a report at that time for something that was called It actually started off as, uh, and they asked me to look into why we had so many abandoned on specific items. And we started to look at it and I said, Look, there's the reason you've got so many abandons is you've got all these big items that are being abandoned. Its Home depot, right, it's appliances. And they said, Well, why do you think that is? And I said, I mean, it's probably it's probably shipping costs, right? So, sure enough, we looked into it and anything that was oversized, you know, kitchen sinks and installations and refrigerators and some of the stuff was a mistake. The shipping costs were being miscalculated, and the shipping costs costs in some cases more than the item themselves. But in other cases, it was just It was just too much. It was, you know, the cost of it was was correct, but it was still too much for somebody to have its ship. So what we did is we started an initiative that was called Opus at the time, and you probably know it now is buy online and pick up in store. And from that we were able to drive forward that entire effort. We had internal discussions, and we started to do the buy online pick up in store within within weeks, and it was a mega winner for home depot dot com. We could immediately for that channel have people buy it online through the online channel. They got their online credit being home depot dot com, got their online sales credit, and their their executives were thrilled on. People could go pick up their stuff in their local store. Um, so home depot dot com was awesome. I was loving. It was killing it, having a great time and A T and T called and said, We've got an even better job for you and I ended up in 18 to dot com. It was at 18 to dot com for about five years. In that five years I was given the I was originally ran. Ah, lot of qualitative sorry quantitative analysis for the implementation of the initial implementation of the footprint for what was called you verse TV. So I was doing a lot of a lot of statistics running. A lot of, you know, data analysis and helping that team understand just how far behind we were and what the problems were that were getting reported back to our Kremchek and and our services people so that we could try to address those as quickly as possible. And we were far behind on git was a challenge to keep up with it. But I was running reports every day and creating great views for our senior leadership team to basically try to understand the mess that we were in. Um, but we got through it, we worked through it. We did great on. As you know today, it's we don't even have you verse anymore. We've, you know, bought the dish TV. They bought dish TV and all sorts of other things, and it's all now I think, just called 18 t t. V or something. But during that time, I was also tasked with an internal project. They found out my analytics background. They moved me squarely to the analytics team instead of the Web analytics team instead of the business analysis team, and they asked me to implement the first, uh, it was the actually the second or third integration of what is now known as Adobe Dynamic tag manager Onda Dobie, dynamic tag manager at the time, was called Satellite, and it was a little tag management system that was in its infancy was created for small to mid market Web websites to manage tagging for analytics tagging. And when we got it, I think the 18 T leadership team that selected the Selection committee had decided to choose that because of the cost, it was far less expensive than T Liam on DSO, which was the other application they were thinking of getting, and it was very simple and and 18 t dot com had a very complex universe, and they figured that it would probably be easier to proliferate. What ended up happening was my director came to me and said, I understand you have a background in technical stuff and I need you to implement this thing for me and I said, Okay, that's great. And I went into the next day I had a meeting with the founder and the lead developer from that organization. Um and, uh, they came to me and they said, Hey, we want to tell you about managing tags and from my previous experience in building analytics tagging and flash, you know, in flash many, many years prior, the meeting took about 10 minutes. I said to him, I have done this before I got this. It's a job script include No problem. I can make it happen. And they looked at me with big eyes and they said, Are you sure? Because this is very complex, complicated and complex to most people. Amazing. This is not a complicated issue. I got it. What was complicated is over the next year. I worked with the development teams for seven different environments. At 18 t dot com, we had seven different templates. So that was a t t dot net. That was by a T t. That were shop a t t. That was Bill A T T. That was there were seven different platforms. I can't remember all of them now, but they each had their own implementation of a template platform, whether that was, um, Adobe based, or I can't remember what they called it. It was like before it was adobe, uh, whatever they call in Adobe these days. Um, so I basically had to work with each of those teams, get to the template level. Include the java include JavaScript include in the each template, so that when any page was created from that point on, we could launch our analytics tagging into that JavaScript include what that basically did is that include reached out to our our library. That was out on the internet. Um, and so I started to work with this, You know, local Atlanta team wave included it in all of the templates over the next year and after the year was up. It was about Christmas. I remember it was Snow was starting to fly. Even here in Atlanta, it was a very small snowstorm and three office was getting empty. And I called into a meeting the marketing team director and he was like a I gotta go. Oh, he was Actually, the VP said. I gotta go. It's starting to snow. I said, This is gonna be worth your time. Just give me five minutes And so we got into a meeting and I said, This is This is done It's delivered and he looked at me and he said, What do you mean it's delivered? I said, I said I can launch I've launched Google Analytics this afternoon through this tagging Google Analytics is live, and it's monitoring all seven applications. He didn't believe me. We pulled up Google analytics and he saw for the first time the Google Analytics Livestream going across and he said, This is this is the most I've ever seen. What was this quote? He said, This is the most I've ever seen. The needle moved at this company in my entire career, he says. So if I wanted to tag this very specific flow in this very specific button, which he had. He was in charge of shop or buy a T T or shop 80 something, he said. Could I do that? I literally said Give me two minutes. I picked up my phone in front of him and I said, I called our develop our lead developer. And I said, I want you to launch a rule that tracks clicks on this, and I want you to put it into a report. You know, this said report that he and I had already set up. He said, Okay, done. I said, Give us five minutes And so we talked about it. I told him about the architecture. Er, I didn't get far into the conversation before my developer called me back and said Has done its live I said, Okay, I said, I said, uh, I want you to open up your open up Google analytics I want you go to that report and I want you to look and your button, your clicks, they're gonna be in there. And he said, Did that just get done just now? Or did you do that in advance? I said, No, no, We just did it right now. The release cycles at A T and T before that were waterfall. They took 34 months because they had to put place some a tag on a page and they had a development team, and they had to do end to end testing, you know, for every little request there were millions of dollars to do the end of testing for every release. And for the first time, I could just say no, we're going to track this this, you know, this click. And it was done almost as quickly as we could write the, you know, the small tracking code. And that opened up in an enormous door for 18 t dot com. From that point forward, we started to work on our data layer. We moved that application and my entire team that I built out over the subsequent months to the I T team and we became a platform the most successful platform launched there in years. While I was working on that effort, I was, you know, giving a call from one of the clients I was working. I had working for me. They were doing some data cleansing for me, and they asked me to come and work for them in a leadership capacity. So I was working for them in a leadership capacity For a while, we did marketing E t. L work essentially. And I left a t and t to go do that. Um, Anyway, long story short, I've been I've been here with my current company, which was previously IBM. That was kind of how things took off. I think there was a moral to that. You know, I would say that, you know, for you students who are might watch this. You know, there are gonna be times in your career when you're gonna not be quite sure what's being handed to you or you know, whether you're gonna be able to make a positive impact If I was in your shoes. What I would want to tell me today to me then, is, you know, take those chances. Um, work hard, prepare yourself hard, be ready for the opportunities and take those chances when they're given to you. Because it's the little things that make all the difference in the world. Um, you know, in your career, nobody's gonna Nobody's gonna hand you a job straight out of the gate to be, you know, the best in your industry. That's that's a hat you're gonna have to earn. Um, today I work for a company we just spun off from IBM. We were, ah, product. Before that, that was just a email provider. It was an E S P and that this E S P was called silver pop and they blended data and analytics And you know, basically all the E s P functions of sending email, sending SMS sending mobile push stuff. But there's, you know, an analytics portion of it and an automation portion of it being able to use that data to drive automated activities. Um, and they were purchased by IBM and rolled into a larger bundle, and IBM couldn't figure out how to make it profitable based on IBM's models and the different bundles that they brought in. And a SWAT team of execs basically rolled off after about five years. Andi, we now call ourselves Acoustic is the name of the company, and it is a It is a marketing tool that is created off, you know, applications that have been around for a while that are innovating and renovating right now, and we're doing some amazing things. Some of the stuff that we're doing is based on a lot of the work I do with my clients every single day, which is, you know, has a lot to do with the Lining data. My job is a technical consultant is toe work with my clients every day who could be a marketing team or somewhere in between the marketing team and the I T team. It's very rare that it's the I t team that I'm talking thio. I noticed one of the questions you know that have been was presented was, you know, what are some of the things you do in challenging circumstances? I live in challenging circumstances. Uh, just be aware when you start working in digital technologies, there is, uh, no love loss between I T teams and marketing teams and and there's a there's a reason for that. The good side of that is for people like us who were involved in business. We can find a way to make money at that, you know, a bridging that gap If you're a good communicator. If you're patient and you understand the language of both sides. You could You could do very well there. Um but, you know, I walk into these opportunities opportunities every single day, and I find a marketing team that's desperate to try to roll out something great and awesome and that, you know, provides, you know, great marketing and brand awareness and that they can report on and, you know, show attribution And I walk into this typically with an I T team that's looking at them going. I don't understand what they're asking for. Frankly, on DATs my job. I'll sit down with my marketing team. I'll work to try to surface out what the requirements are that they're trying to accomplish, and I'll work with their I T team to try to set up data processes on the back end that actually will allow this marketing team to do what they need to dio. Um, you know, one example of this is, you know, I had a client. It's actually on our acoustic dot com. This was last year or the year prior. I can't remember. They were called widely publishing, while the publishing basically does. Since we're talking to schools here and students. You guys will relate to this. Um, widely publishing does, um, school? Uh, sorry. Uh, student nurturing. So four schools for probably several of the, you know, schools that might be on mentors students dot or GTA. But, you know, basically when, for example, said school says, you know, we have these programs, how do they get students to enroll in them while they will step in and start to, you know, send out emails and nurture these students? So if, uh, if the students said, you know, submits a form on the school's website and says, I'm interested in this program, right, that becomes an opportunity in their sales force Now, Now they have to nurture that student and figure out how they're going to get that student to enroll all the way through their first semester. And when they get their first report card, that's what Wiley does. Wiley was buried in data trying to cut lists and, you know, figure out who was where in the In the Funnel. We simply came in and helped him clean up their methodology for tracking things in. In salesforce dot com, we aligned that with their E S P by providing statuses and, you know, relational tables that would allow, you know, clear visibility as to where these people were in thes students were in the funnel and then to boot. What we did is we kind of circled that data around, and we set up Ah, Siris of automated programs that based on what is in their data, their line of data and they're in the master database. It basically would be a flag that would say, Hey, we already know the students submitted their application. Why air we manually going back and calling a list in creating a send when we can just say we can see in the data that this is here, go ahead and send him the next email and that's what we did. We set up a bunch of Siris of automation that was basically a welcome Siri's all the way through an enrollment. Siri's all the way through a first report card, Siri's, so that that entire marketing team could step back and stop focusing on cutting lists and cutting, you know, data and calling data every day, but could start to focus on marketing content. What is the message I'm putting across. How am I representing my client? Which was that the school on DWhite. Should we be saying to get these people through the nurturing path? You can look at that on acoustic dot com. You can go and you can look at the white papers and you can read what my client had to say about that effort. But we and there are videos there, but we we, uh, off lifted a tremendous amount of work from them and enable them to just become marketers again. On that was that was a tremendous effort. So I think in this long story, I've been able to answer several of the questions that were in the list that were provided to me. I hope this was worthwhile.

so responsibilities in my job. My current job is to make sure that you are communicating well between the technical teams in the marketing team. You know, your job is to help draw the picture for both both teams and help them understand what the ask is and what the delivery herbal is. Communication is really important. Patients is really important. And, um, bringing a, uh, heavy ego is not that important. Just be ready to be yelled at. Be ready to be wrestled and be ready to stand your ground as well as needed, uh, as a professional and as somebody who's a knowledgeable consultant. But sometimes these air challenging conversations, but with patience and understanding, you can get through them and you can have a lot of success.

Yeah. So, with with my background in in front end development, that comes in handy quite a bit when you're working on analytics tagging and the work. So you know, some front end development and J quarry JavaScript, html CSS, that kind of stuff. Super important. I don't know that you necessarily have to be a crack developer, but understanding it well enough to be able to navigate it and find the important parts of you know of the code is pretty important. Um, types of applications is probably the best question, you know, et l work understanding what an e t l is what a detail does understanding crm what a CRM is what a CRM does and how it's useful. Uh, email service provider and E S p understanding what that is and how it works is super important. Um, I I would think that, you know, just in what I've just described, there's probably a storyline there where you just need to generally understand the issues that marketing departments are dealing with every single day in digital communications, and it would be very clear