Episode 1

Show Transcript:

When you do one thing for a really long time you don’t usually get the opportunity or take the time to think about the things you really want. Sure, some of us have hobbies some of us have kids some of us have extracurricular activities that keep us busy but when it comes to a career and a job especially in the creative field, you’re always looking for ways to feed that creative beast inside of you.

But in most lines of business, you get caught up in the daily things, and the daily deadlines, and the rush to accomplish things that are only just good enough. There are other people’s ideas that you might be executing and when all of that ends suddenly due to a layoff or some other circumstances it’s like being underwater and finally coming up for air and realizing that you’re in the middle of a vast ocean and you’re just treading water trying to get a grip on your surroundings.

Your mind races and immediately tries to think about or form a plan of action but there’s a sense of hopelessness and a sense of being unsure about what you’re good at. And maybe some people know, or have a direction and they can immediately act upon that and follow it. But when you’ve spent half your life working and trying to move up in your career at your job and then you no longer have one, it changes your perception of what it means to be creative and you start to question what you’ve done and if that’s even what you really want to do. Dramatic? Maybe. Reality? Definitely.

As a creative director I know that I love working with people. I love solving problems with other creatives. The happiest and most exciting times in my career were the times when I got to sit down, whether in person or digitally, with somebody and bounce ideas off one another and iterate on concepts. I loved the times when I would be the one actually doing the design work and laying out the pictures and words that would make an impact on a campaign. But I also loved mentoring and giving instruction and guiding designers and art directors and copywriters. Sharing my knowledge to try to get the best work out of them.

In my current unemployed state, I see many people at all stages of their creative careers that are in the same boat as me and are sharing the same experiences on platforms such as LinkedIn. And it made me wonder if there was a way that I could talk to people like this and engage with them and maybe help them to find what it is they love doing. And in that effort hopefully learn about myself as a creative individual.

I promise this will be the last episode where you have to listen solely to my voice and you can listen and learn from other creatives. But right now, I’ll share my story.

I grew up in Northeast Philly and found my love of art in high school. My art teacher there was influential in recognizing my talent and helping me make the decision to pursue my creative passion by enrolling in the graphic design program at Drexel University. The program there is world-class and definitely gave me what I felt was a technical advantage over students from other local programs. The program was very much focused on branding, print and publication production, and things like video, web and digital were completely different majors. Ironically, my 2^nd co-op job during school was with a company that managed websites, something I was not formally trained in, and I had to teach myself how to code using a good old HTML for Dummies book.

But this was a time before cell phones, social media or even YouTube, and in a post 9/11 world that I graduated into, job hunting consisted of printing and mailing your resume and cover letter cold to potential employers or visiting Monster or CareerBuilder.com to apply to listings there. Online portfolios weren’t really a thing yet, so we carried around large metal brief cases with our work mounted on posterboard, wearing suits to present to hiring managers. It was still hard to get in with an agency back then but at least you didn’t know how hard it was for everyone else so you didn’t feel as bad.

I was fortunate enough to land a freelance designer role doing ad layouts at the publication the Jewish Exponent and from there got my first full-time job at a printer/courier service in Center City as the only designer working on all sorts of design projects for local businesses and lawfirms. My boss was the namesake of the company and was tough on me. But he took a liking to me after a while and taught me the value of managing my time, being thorough with my work and following process. I still like to quote him when helping designers learn how to prioritize projects or tasks. He said, Do the thing that can be done the quickest first. Think of it like being a waiter. You don’t wait for the steak to be done for one table before you deliver the coffee to the other table.

From there I took the opportunity to move into the corporate world by joining the reprographics shop inside Merck. Again, I was the only designer on staff with no true creative manager, but I became fast friends with my site manager, and we embarked on a side business marketing custom countdown calendars to colleges, sports teams and the cruise industry. Here I learned about how to launch a business, writing business plans, pitching services and even how to pivot when one potential client said he wanted to be on customers computers and not sitting on their desk.

Unfortunately, that side company closed operations after only a year and eventually, I felt trapped at the day job. The work was not challenging or creative and I spent my time creating posters or filling binders or meeting vendors. It certainly didn’t give me the feeling of motivation and creativity I felt when pursuing the side business. After a few years I managed to land a role as a designer at a small private recruitment agency. Somehow, yet again, I was the only (and last) designer that company would have before the great recession claimed us as a victim. But the lessons from my previous roles were reinforced here. The attention to detail, following process, the ability to be creative and handle a large workload under tight deadlines, the client services part of the business. I taught myself even more coding, Flash animation, website management and product launch as I helped my boss launch two new business services by designing the logos and branding for both ventures. It was a great place to be… until it wasn’t.

In 2010, I found myself out of work at the same time I became a new father. When my daughter was born I was instantly in love. I had never felt so happy or connected to another human being in my life. 3 months later, I lost my job and I was terrified of what was going to happen and how I was going to help support this beautiful tiny baby. It took me 12 months to find a job, but in that time, I had the amazing opportunity to care for my daughter and spend every minute with her. And looking back on that now was probably the greatest gift I could have been given. It was worth every minute of driving to work every day and sitting in an office and doing something that was more of a job than an expression of creativity to be able to spend that precious time with my daughter.

I took the time to freelance to try to stay creative but at the time I was just living moment to moment as a new parent. When I finally got the opportunity to go back to work, I was at the point where I did it because I needed a job. Based on my previous experience in Pharma, I didn’t really want to go back into it into that line of business, but it had to happen, and it was something that started me on the journey to where I am today.

When I started at Tag, then Williams Lea, I was part of the on-site team that helped service Pfizer colleagues with their internal creative requests. But at the time, Pfizer had just purchased Wyeth and there was a lot of uncertainty and restructuring going on. So, when I got there, there were some people that were held over from the internal Wyeth Media team and a freelancer. Well, within 2 months of being there, everyone had left or been let go due to lack of work and it was me and my manager. Again, I was the only creative on the team (which seems to be a theme in my career), and we decided that we could either sit and wait for the work to come in, or we could go get it. This was not part of the business model, but we used that to our advantage. We made a pitch deck and networked within Pfizer and landed new business presentations that showed off what we could do. This led us to meeting with the brand marketing teams and eventually we began stealing work from AORs. It was an exciting time for sure, but busy given that I was handling all the design work and even some clients directly.

It fostered a sense of entrepreneurial spirit, and it was inspiring to feel like I was creating something special and new. The best was when my manager would walk in from a meeting and say, “hey do you know how to do this?” and I would say, no, and she would say, well you have to figure it out in like 2 days.

I like to think creativity is not just the art form, you know, the “drawing pictures” aspect, it’s the challenge of solving problems. Of being open to learning things on the fly and pushing yourself even when you may be unsure of the outcome.

You know, one of the best parts of wherever I’ve worked is that my manager or boss and I have been become more like partners than having a traditional managerial role. I was able to quickly foster a sense of trust in them, and it led to them feeling as though they could say yes to any project because they knew they could rely on me to come up with a great concept, the right design aesthetic, learn a new skill quickly, or figure out a way to solve a problem.

Over time, our business at Pfizer grew and our team expanded. I found myself learning how to interview and hire people and then (of course) without any real training, how to manage a creative team. I had to evolve my own workflows to support a team. I had to learn how to delegate and to give constructive feedback on the work in a way that helped my team learn and grow.

Looking back, one of the things I loved the most about my role as a Studio Manager and a Creative director was the teaching aspect. The small team of designers and art directors I had all could say they left that job with new skills, whether it was learning how to code an email, picking up a new program like After Effects, understanding how to storyboard for a video, or learning the nuances of the regulatory process.

My approach to creative leadership was to make sure that my team felt completely supported and could come to me with questions or issues, but also knew that I trusted them to manage their work like adults and make thoughtful design decisions. I always wanted them to feel valued and part of a team that would make them better in their role. I think the one thing I’ve learned about how leadership can affect creativity is that if creative colleagues felt they couldn’t take chances because they would get in trouble somehow, they will just stay in their lanes and take orders instead of feeling empowered to go outside the brief and find ways to do great work no matter what the project was. Good creative leadership is allowing your team to feel invested, both in the process and in the results.

So, I ended up staying with Tag for 12 years. I met a lot of amazing people, I helped to build something that didn’t exist before. I learned a lot about the Pharma industry and I learned a lot about how to execute different roles. I was a designer, a manager, an Art Director, an editor, a copywriter, a submissions specialist, a business developer, a Creative Ops associate, and a Creative Director. Even though I spent so much time learning how to execute those roles, I never thought about my “why” in my career. I was just so busy being relied on to do these things that the concept that I had a say in what my motivations were never crossed my mind, until the day I didn’t have those things anymore.

It’s why I’ve taken this time away from work to focus on me and who I am, and who I want to be. I’ve started seeking help through therapy for the first time in my life and creative mentorship with the great ECD Rodd Chant. It’s made me see that there are opportunities out there as long as I’m willing to work at it. It has also revealed to me that opportunities can be created as long as I’m willing to get out of my own head and put myself out there. So now you know more about me than maybe you wanted to, but now I’d love to know about you. About how you got to where you are today. About what inspires you. I want to hear about similar challenges you may have gone through and hopefully it encourages you to be honest about your own ups and downs. And finally, I want to know about how I can help you. How can we help each other reignite the creative flame. I hope you’ll join me on that journey.