Differentiators

I am a practitioner, not just a leader that stays in the clouds with strategy. While I am still honing my craft after 18+ years, my background has molded me into a generalist (Jack-of-All-Trades), which allows me to speak to all team members with deep insights, understanding, and rationale. Extensive experience with creative strategy, brand storytelling, brand architecture, integrated campaign development, paid media, print, web, social, project management, videography, and photography. Beyond doing the work, I have been fortunate to work with some of the top external partners including Isobar, Tombras, Quigley-Simpson, and Prophet.

As creativity is subjective, the one thing that grounds most decisions I make strategically is an unwavering commitment to insights. I’ve been fortunate to have a strong Advanced Analytics team that understood the value of arming creative with consumable data to make decisions. Whether it is member, persona, trend, or geographic data, it is the foundation to make educated decisions. Without insights, executions are just the team’s thoughts and hopes. Some of the simplest forms of insights I value are focus groups, A/B testing and even using Facebook’s Creative Hub to ensure the visuals and messaging are optimized.

Success

Success may not always be about projects and results; my most successful work will never appear in my portfolio. It’s the intangibles, speed, and efficiency of how I get to the final idea/execution. This process makes me unique and allows others to be set up for success. In addition, success is encapsulated by daily interactions and when you clear barriers and develop a path for others to be successful. I show up to work, or ZOOM, with a heap of positivity I infuse into the culture and those I interact with.

Regarding tangible business success, since January 2018 through June 2020, I was able to reduce valuable agency dependencies and save the company $2.5M, $1M of which happened in 2020. This happened based on 2 key points: understanding and advising long-term marketing strategy and by developing a successful vision to match the strategy. Beyond those financial savings, this came at no new cost to the company; we retained the same headcount, talent and roles. We increased core capabilities with education and training. The new vision included a heavy dose of new creative expertise including paid social, display, videography and photography. Furthermore, the KPIs remained the same or in several cases up to 20% better. This successful vision and execution showcases it wasn’t just about cutting the hard agency costs, the positive KPIs beared out as well.

The three success I am most proud of:

High retention rate

After leading the in-house creative team of 10 colleagues since 2014, I have an extremely high retention rate. There have only been two scenarios of colleagues leaving my team.

1. Relocation: Like many companies, we were not setup to allow remote work.
2. Transition to another team: Through professional development and mentoring, a Designer and I came to a conclusion he was energized by the company’s mission, but determined moving into a UI/UX role was his long-term passion. By chance, I heard there was an upcoming opportunity for a new role and I not only made the recommendation to the Designer but also to the hiring manager.

Small but mighty teams

I was promoted to Marketing Director during a business reorganization to specifically cut global costs. Typically when cutting employees and partners success rarely follows. Our small but mighty team still had a lot to prove as our company was moving to be digital-first.

• With the support of an amazing, and small team, I devised the school’s first email lead nurture campaign; personalized emails deployed based on the contact’s survey response. This personalized user journey resulted in a +25% open rate and contacts who engaged in the email series were twice as likely to enroll, 4.9% vs 2.4%.
• Tested and optimized website performance including homepage and navigation redesigns, layout variations, various media options, and shortened contact forms. Organic Traffic +3%, Referral Traffic +1.2%, Direct Traffic +.5%, shortened contact form +15% in leads, homepage leads increase +48%, organic leads increased +41% and application submissions increased +19%.
• Implemented new organic and paid social media tactics, results included Weekly Profile Impressions increased by +282%, and reduced paid social Cost Per Inquiry -64% ($141 to $51). New tactics included a reimagined mix of daily content highlighting daily school activities, events, field trips, and reminders which all helped “bring the online campus to life” while informing prospective families how we were unique.
• Combined enhanced digital strategies led to exceeding re-enrollment revenue by +35%, from January-May 2023.

National brand identity

While creative directing my first national TV commercial was a milestone accomplishment, designing the current SilverSneakers logo was still one of my all-time greatest successes. Circa 2014, I was a Senior Graphic Designer at Healthways (now Tivity Health) and our Marketing Director sent out an email to the Designers and provided the opportunity to develop a new logo, with minimal creative brief details. At the time, there weren’t too many opportunities for new creative work so I jumped at the opportunity to over-delivered several shotgun concepts to gain a better understanding of what leadership was wanting. To make a long story short, the logo that is still being used today and seen by millions of Americans each day is still the same logo I initially pitched.

Fun Fact: I almost didn’t apply to work at Healthways at the time because the logo was so far behind the trends and standards. I saw it one of two ways: either leadership was unaware of how dated it was or I had an opportunity to evolve the brand. Fortunately for me, I applied for the Senior Graphic Designer position and progressed to Manager and Director in 4 years.

Leadership style

I believe in participative and servant leadership; over-indexing on an individual’s growth and maximizing their full potential. This doesn’t just apply to my teammates; some of the largest growth I have influenced were individuals not on my team.

While there are times to give directives, I have found a balance of providing a path allowing the team to participate in the solution. This has proven to have the team buy-in, increased passion, and even harnesses increased results as the team was a part of the strategy, not just forced on them. A participative environment also allows for exceeding expectations to become the norm; the team’s neurons are moving faster and they approach the problem from a solution-oriented perspective, not a task-based one.

After understanding the business, client, or department objectives, I create an annual vision/roadmap. I provide a clear long and short-term team vision in January. The vision is imperative; it ensures the team’s success and loosely is broken down into the principles of start, stop and continue. Changes or updates may be cultural, performance, hard or soft skills which are needed to meet the clear business objectives. Regardless of what the team’s success looks like, the vision is the place to align everyone, obtain buy-in and develop a plan to get there.

Principles