I'd say that it's been a long, winding road to where I am today. I began my career in Hollywood, in the entertainment industry of all places, and after a couple of years, I realized that it wasn't the best fit. I think one thing to take away from my experience is that often you set out to do something you have a vision for it, and then when you actually experience it, it's very different than the picture you had in your head. So, I decided to switch course and try something different. I've always been a strong writer and have an interest in writing and creative ideation, so advertising seemed like it might be a suitable pivot from the entertainment industry because I could still be creative, but also pay the bills. So I was fortunate enough to land a job in a large marketing and advertising agency in Boston, and that was through good old fashioned networking and that has set me on my current path. I've been in marketing advertising ever since, after sort of switching gears from Hollywood to this current industry but I've held a lot of different roles, I have worked in agencies, I have worked for the internal marketing departments for companies, I've also done my own consulting, basically ran my own marketing consultancy. So I've experienced this industry from a lot of different angles and I feel confident that it's the right fit for me at this point, but it's important for everyone to know that it does take a lot of trial and error to find that sweet spot.

I am a director at USADATA. USADATA is a digital marketing agency. We provide customer data insights, we build marketing campaigns based on those insights and we also offer technology solutions, meaning that we have developers create custom web applications that can help our clients find new customers and do so at scale. So if they have a lot of different locations, retail locations around the country, we help them come up with marketing strategies that they can roll out to hundreds, if not thousands of locations so that's sort of a pain point that we solve for our clients. In terms of my role specifically, I guess it's sort of a unique role, in that I have a lot of different responsibilities. I speak at trade shows, so I represent the company as a brand ambassador. I'll give presentations on our process and discipline and how we use our various strategies to help our clients and this is in the hopes to educate attendees and also attract future customers. I'll pick up the phone and make cold calls to prospective clients I'll answer inquiries. So I also have a bit of a sales role, if you will, I provide a lot of input onto our creative work for our clients as I mentioned, I have a writing background. So if we have copyrighting needs or if we need to provide recommendations on how to make a piece of marketing more compelling, I tapped into my experience there. I also head up a business development team, it's brand new. So we just hired on three sales associates. I'm based in Portland, Maine so we opened in office appear and we're a couple of weeks in actually so we're really trying to build a healthy pipeline of marketing clients and continuously generate opportunities for the agency. I should say that we serve the entire country so we were based in Portland, our headquarters are in New York, but we go all over the country working with clients pretty much in every region in State.

I would say the tool I use most is PowerPoint because I am in a business development role. I need to be able to communicate strategies to prospective clients and current clients effectively. I know PowerPoint can be very cumbersome, there are a lot of jokes in the business world, but I can consistently use that tool more so than any other. I am constantly writing emails, we use outlook for that, Microsoft Outlook. Slack is a big instant messaging tool that we use, a quick question for our data services director or I need one of our account managers to weigh in on a client problem that we're trying to solve. I'll shoot them a quick, slack message. I would also say that increasingly, I would highly recommend that students learn excel, and that's one of those things that's ever going to go away and consistently impresses folks who don't have a lot of experience using excel if you know your way around a spreadsheet. So even watching some basic tutorials on YouTube will really go a long way because if you know how to structure simple data in a spreadsheet, sort it, filter it and present it in a way that's meaningful to management within your organization, you'll get ahead very quickly. So that's another tool that I can't say that I'm an expert at but I appreciate it and I see the value in it. Then for more creative efforts, there's the adobe creative suite so I have used InDesign in the past for laying out certain pieces of creative. Those are all sorts of quality check tools like a Litmus is a good tool that allows you to see how your marketing content will display across dozens of different platforms. So for instance, you want to know how your email is going to look, if someone is using an outdated version of Microsoft Outlook, you can use this tool to test all of those various iterations. So I guess the key takeaway for this is that there are 1000 tools out there, and there are more every day, especially in the world of digital marketing, it's impossible to use every single one, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. I highly recommend hopping onto YouTube and checking out demos and tutorials, there is probably one for the tool that you're using but those are the top ones that I use consistently on a daily basis.