I graduated from Georgetown University, and soon after that, I worked for a while and then went back to school. I went to Columbia University and got an MBA. My story starts before the MBA. But I think that was a turning point getting the MBA. I came from a liberal arts background, and so some of the classes that I was taking at Columbia, I had not, I hadn't been in an accounting class in an extremely long time, so it was a good a really good way of expanding how I think and I also made a lot of friends. It was a great experience. And then there, there were a few different jobs, But I think when I skip forward to where do I feel like things really began to solidify? It was when, after I finished my time in New York, I came back to Dallas. I ended up in a start-up company. It was called TruLogica. I was head of marketing at that place. Very small company it was like 25 people. So being head of marketing was not a huge cachet there, but I did literally everything because there was very little budget. It was two people in the marketing department, eventually three. But I was writing with a Web copy. I mean, literally doing everything, Good experience, because you become extremely agile, and you also become very frugal, thinking about always how do you do things in a cheap way? After that, interestingly, Avigilon was acquired by Hewlett Packard. So that was a critical moment because I don't think I would have ended up in a large company like a Fortune 500 were it not for that situation, which had really nothing to do with me. It was HP acquiring my company. So, I learned a tremendous amount in HP. I'm very, very thankful for the time that I had there. I was there for 10 years in a variety of marketing roles. And so I think that's another thing I would point out is that you want to be as well rounded as you can, right? So, having experience in campaigns, content, competitive intelligence, sales enablement come to some degree brands and Communications, too. But that was a little bit lighter on those, I would say. I did a lot of different things within HP and each thing that I took on, it was a move up in terms of responsibility, level, that kind of thing. I decided to leave Hp and went on to a company called the Avigilon. That was another interesting story. I was head of marketing communications globally for a year. And that was not a good culture fit for me. And that was an important milestone because one of the things I truly believe is that you have to trust you not to be best friends with, but you have to trust the people that you report to and that you work with. And if you think that they're unethical or you don't have trust in them, it's not gonna be a good relationship, just like with friendships or anything. I wasn't happy at Avigilon towards the end. The good news is I did not run away from it. Something came to me. And that's what a mentor always said to me. is. don't run from something wrong. Run to something. It's a mindset. And Ericsson came to me, and this position is really considered the CMO of North America. This is a big company with five regions and headquarters in Stockholm but in the U. S. And Canada, sort my region. I have complete basically complete autonomy around what we do from a marketing and communications perspective. So that was a long answer. But that's that. Those were some of the critical steps that I think enabled me to get where I am.

I have an interesting group under me. And the reason for what I'm about to explain is that this is how at the headquarters in Stockholm, marketing and communications structures, we really stick to the same structure that global has. So the reason I mentioned that is that you might be surprised to know that government and industry relations fall under marketing. I have a team mainly sitting in Washington, D. C. Who lobby on behalf of our customers, their lawyers. And if you think about the FCC and Spectrum and some of the things that we're doing, all telcos they're doing to enable 5G, you've probably heard that in the advertisements. There's that's just one example is the FCC, you know, auctioning off the spectrum. We might lobby for that. We might talk to Chairman a Jeep. I and talk to him about the importance of the mid-band spectrum when it comes to 5G and push on him based on our client's needs to auction off more spectrum. Anyway, that's government and industry relations. I also have sustainability and corporate responsibility. That's a new area for me. It's a huge area for Ericsson, and I'm super excited about that one. I have content marketing. I have digital marketing of external and internal communications. I have one operations person that manages my budget, and I have an events and experiences team, and they're an interesting group. Not only do they do events, but they're a group of about eight, and they happen to be all men, some of whom were PhDs. They're highly technical, most of them engineers. And they take our technology and create demonstrations that we can use at our events. Which is why I connected events and experiences and put them under one leader. So that's my team. Important groups on my team and that is account-based marketing. So in our region, the majority of our sales come from only four customers and you've heard of all of them. AT&T, Verizon Sprint and T-Mobile. So knowing that we're not going after thousands of companies to generate new business, we're really going after four. And there's more than that. But, I mean, it's really basically that you need an account-based marketing organization because you need somebody to be in that account, understanding that account, what is the business that needs to be done in that account. And then how do you develop a marketing plan to align with the business goals of that account? So you asked about my work? A lot of my work is mentoring my team, meeting with my team, setting vision and direction. Right now, what I'm doing a lot of is working on our strategy, finalizing the strategy. And, this is I know a lot of students are watching this. I mean, in a perfect world, you'd have every resource that you need. You'd have every dollar that you need. If you need more employees, you could just go out and look for new employees and hire them. But that's not how it works. We have a number of projects that don't have owners, but we believe that they need to be done. So I'm taking on a few of those. So one of them has to do with government and preparing my boss, who's the CEO of North America for different meetings with government officials and writing the briefs, writing the things that he will give out to the government stakeholders when he goes there. So it's not that there is some tactical work that I do, but I try to stay at a more strategic level exclusively in the office. I like it. And HP. For 10 years, I worked at home, so it was a transition. But I really like this. I think that nothing replaces face to face communication and face to face work. So I prefer it. From a travel perspective, the Coronavirus has slowed us all down. I'm sure everybody in every business. So we're not traveling right now. However, generally speaking, I will travel from 1 to 2, maybe sometimes three times a month. Quarterly trips to Stockholm, Sweden, and then the other. The other trips have to do with Where's the customer? What event is happening? maybe a meeting with a customer or a meeting with a vendor.

So I work with my peers, and my peers are the leadership team of North America. There are a lot of salespeople in that group and, I didn't mention this before, but one of the things I do every month is I have a brief phone call. If we can get to be in person, that's great. But a lot of times its a phone with the head of each account, the head of the AT & T account, the head of the Sprint account. So that is something that is a group that I work with frequently because I see them as my customers. I also work with a lot of vendors. Right now, I'm working with The New York Times. We're doing some events with them. I talked to him today. We talked to agencies. I talked to agencies about the work that they're doing for us. Maybe creative work. I talked to peers of my and Sweden Either the CMO or her leadership team. Or even further down the organization.