I started this role as a new mom. New year, new company, new kid. And it was a whirlwind. This was a true startup vibe and this role taught me a lot about resilience. There was a lot of management turnover during my first year and I had to prove myself over and over again.I like to say that this role was the biggest challenge of my career. Marketing in cybersecurity is hard. You are drowning in sameness. There are so many products. The people you are marketing to are the most suspicious and untrusting (comes with the job). It is a tough nut to crack. I've never done more product, market, and buyer research 👏🏼 in 👏🏼 my 👏🏼 life.There were a lot of lessons learned trying to find our place in the market. And one of them was that the answer is not always a clear path. You just have to take a risk and sit with it for a minute. If it's not working, iterate.This job is where I really honed in and built my skillset in research, positioning, and messaging and learned the importance of having everyone on board from the top down or it's not going to work out.I also had to start driving more so I got really into podcasts, specifically marketing and business ones. So now my brain is just constantly full of things I want to do and try.

All throughout my career I had taken on various jobs in digital marketing, branding, and design to just keep the creative juices (and the cash) flowing. I got to work with different types of people in a lot of different industries on some really fun projects.Before I had my little girl I had also opened up a marketing shirt shop with funny phrases and sayings. But that died shortly after my daughter was born. The cobbler's kid has no shoes type of scenario.It was a fun project to work on when we were all stuck at home, but I've pretty much closed up shop here as I prefer making memories with my kiddo. Maybe someday I'll begin to dabble in it again, but my focus is being a mom.

This role is when I really started to feel highly confident in myself and my abilities. I had grown so much and I continued to build my skillset.I had a growing voice in our marketing strategy and in this role I even took over the management of our social media channels, which gave me a new level of respect for social media managers. The job is not easy.After a while, I started to get the itch to take on a new challenge, since birthing a child didn't seem like enough of one 🫠

I was the first designer hired for the Hospitality Solutions business unit within Sabre. It was like a small startup within a 4 billion dollar org. It was my job to own and establish the brand voice, story and design direction for this unit.This job was highly challenging to me, and b2b was vastly different than the b2c land i had come from. But I loved how challenging it was. This job was where I learned the most about what marketing is and where I developed my passion for marketing automation and operations.I had finally found my ideal role, fulfilling the need to use both the right and left side of my brain. I got to do coding, automation, strategy, copywriting, email, and a ton of other stuff.In this role I had to be scrappy. It was a small team with lofty goals. So we had to strategize and execute quickly. I learned a lot and got to work with some really brilliant people.

By this time, the store count had increased by 593%. And I was really happy with the progression of the brand and how far it had come.But I was doing a lot of print and packaging work, and I wanted to do more digital design. I had always loved web design (I made my first website, for a boyband, when I was a sophomore in high school). I was also yearning to play a larger role in the overall marketing strategy so I felt it was time to move on.

I found my voice pretty quickly and began sharing my big picture vision and where I think the brand should be headed. The store count was growing but there wasn't a lot of consumer passion for the brand. In addition, the brand itself was not reflective of the history and story the founders wanted to portray.This role was where I learned the importance of brand and consistency in messaging and visuals.

Before my first "real, go into an office job" I was living in Austin. It was that wonderful time when jobs were scarce and I ended up moving to Dallas to start my first job as a graphic designer.I was on the marketing team so one could say this is where my interest in marketing began.

This was my first dabble into the world of b2b tech. Though I worked remotely, it gave me a great example of what culture could be like. And it taught me that I was pretty good at using the left side of my brain and that I could consume a lot of content really fast.