So it really started off with doing a lot of research when I was young, on different career paths and thinking through what I wanted out of life. One of the career paths that I was really interested in was marine biology, and I didn't choose that because I recognize that the lifestyle that I would lead with that path wasn't what I wanted for the whole rest of my life. So I chose to go towards advertising and marketing because I found it interesting. It had a variety of different disciplines in it, and I said about a course to pick my education, to support that career objective and because I was very focused and I had a lot of research, I very much a researcher. So I had my information and I was able to pick um from the universities that I wanted to go Thio throughout the course of my career. That was Ah, that was pivotal, including going to Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Business, which is the premier marketing MBA in the United States. So, um so along those lines, I was able to also select a variety of different types of roles. I was again very much a researcher in my very first role. This is something that can be hard, um, for young students to get that first job to get the brake. When I wanted to go into advertising, I realized that when advertising agencies, when big deals, they increase their staff. So I followed along with who was winning what? And then I sent my resume proactively, um, in order to land my first job and then once we have our first job, then it's a lot easier. I started with Ogilvy and Mather Advertising in Los Angeles, and then, with that name on my background and the networking that having that first job allows, I was able to continue my career in a lot of different directions in marketing, yeah.

well, we do a lot of different things in this role. We have corporate strategy type work where we look at total market analysis. We look at global trends in business and economics. We also look at how are we going, Thio move, um, potential customers Thio the point of awareness and then all the way through to purchasing. And then, um, it doesn't stop there because once we have customers, we also still market to customers in customer marketing sort of scenario. Um, part of that involves how do we make ourselves known to the marketplace and who was the important folks to make yourself known to, which is again a lot of research to understand what we call personas or ideal customer profiles, and build that into how we go to market and provide that intelligence back to our leadership into our board of directors so that they understand what the opportunities arethe weekly work hours kind of vary, and I think most people who have gone to a fully remote work situation, like I have find that we are working more hours and that it is more difficult to distinguish between personal time and work time. So I would say that there are definitely moments where it goes, you know, towards late at night and sometimes on the weekend. But then other times when we're not in as much of a push to finish something that might have a lot more flexibility. So this one of the good things about this job is that there is flexibility. We can decide how many meetings to take. We usually take too many. This is a common problem in business is that we have too many meetings. But we understand, too, that, for example, of every Friday we don't schedule meetings ever. It's like a forbidden day so that we can focus and dio the thinking work that requires not interruption time. One of the things I've learned is that you have to make those non interruption times in a role like mine, Otherwise your calendar just gets filled up. So um, the top priorities. Right now we are at protect Retty. We're going through Ah, complete rebranding, which is a huge exercise and involves, you know, changing over the colors and the logo and the messaging. Every single thing about how we go to market is in flux, and we're building a new website. We're building a new digital marketing engine, which involves putting together a lot of technology. And my favorite thing is to build the measurement systems that help us understand how to build optimal marketing. Marketing is not like this thing where you just go and do whatever you want to anymore. It is now all about driving information for the business. I call this role basically being like the Digital Central Intelligence Agency for our business, because we understand how our prospects and customers air interacting with us digitally, and that's really important

uh, major challenges. Um, too many competing objectives. So it can be very difficult for, uh, to get a limited number of objectives. And if we have too many objectives and we try to spread ourselves too thin, especially with marketing budgets, we are ineffective at everything that we dio. So it can be very difficult to limit the number of objectives and to say no to certain projects because they're all really worthy and they all deserve to be worked on, but they can't. So, um, overall, I would say it's very important to decide what you're going to say yes to and what you're gonna say no to, because when when you say yes to things, you're implicitly saying no to other things that you may not mean to be saying no to. So it's really important. And then, um, the other, I would say pain point has to do with knowing how to get in approval, just really having a clear process that says, These are the people who are going to drive these, the ones that are going to approve and knowing when you have approval. That is a challenge. It is a dynamic environment with personalities and people that all work in different ways and diversity is great, but it can be difficult sometimes when you don't know what that process is. Ah, lot of technology companies don't spend a lot of time and energy on building a process, and and then they suffer from lack of understanding how to actually move from one stage to the other in their programs.