Growing Up in WordPress

Coming from the girl with the bag: Not here to code. 

The growth and success I have found in my 15 years as a marketing professional has absolutely been impacted by WordPress, more specifically, the WordPress community. 

10 years ago I was working in a corporate marketing environment and I was really coming into myself as a professional. I was figuring out how to batch work and align strategic planning with task blocking while collaborating with sales teams in the field.

I was operating a $750k budget in addition to the $1.5M budget that I co-operated with sales and product dev, and it was amazing what I could do with those resources. Our regional division was leading the company in pre-sales, lead conversion rates, engagement across our digital platforms and I was setting a new bar for marketing divisions across the country. I was helping to drive tens of millions of dollars into our pipeline.

Then I got fired.

Dealing With The Yuck

Why? I became a whistleblower against some good-ol-boy business practices which interfered with  my ability to be *absolutely* amazing instead of regular amazing. The VP of Sales had a suspicious relationship with one of our marketing vendors, and despite me finding a better solution for more than half the price, I was asked to “drop it” and to leave the vendor securely in our budget (full story available over wine any time if I see you irl). 

Long story short, I was eventually dismissed on the spot, I received a severance package, and I resolved to never let others’ lack of integrity compromise my work again. I used those funds as fuel and started MKConsulting.

What does this have to do with WordPress or the WordPress community?

Nothing, yet.

Finding Something New

Honestly at this point in my marketing career I had actively worked to remove websites from WordPress in a number of jobs I had because it was clunky and ugly, and I didn’t get it.  I had spent 6 years dealing with WP off and on and never even knew the community existed.

I spent the next two years learning how to be a business owner and how to run a marketing agency. Or was I just freelancing? I wasn’t really sure. I got my MBA so I could learn more about entire business operating systems and to break up the exclusive sales/marketing/user lens I had leveraged to date. I spoke at local events, I joined clubs, the hustle was real. 

I found my way into start-ups, as they were a great place for me to really showcase my market research abilities, strategic go to market positioning skills, and love for brand building. 

One particular startup led me to a connection that brought me my first long term retainer customer – a WordPress hosting company. That startup, and the connections that came from it, are still driving major work, joy, and passion for me, bittersweetly and tragically fracturing into different aspects of my life.

Finding WordPress

I followed one of those fellow executives for work, as he was now the CEO of my new client, and he invited me to this thing called a Word Camp. 

I got to travel to Seattle for my first time – and my life changed forever. Bridget Willard took me on an introduction tour at the speaker/sponsor pre dinner and it was so different from anything else I had experienced in my corporate marketing career. 

After the initial shock to my system wore off caused by the sheer number of t-shirts, and the utmost display of casual community I had ever witnessed at a conference (by then I had attended dozens of tech conferences and other corporate industry events), there was something special about it – it was real. These were real humans that cared about being successful in more than one way. And honestly, it really took me getting to my first WCUS before it all really clicked for me. 

For the first time in my career I found an intersection of desire for business growth AND ethical display of integrity and sustainable values, seamlessly co-existing. 

The people were warm and welcoming and cared about my human plight more than my value as a productive professional. 

This was confusing for me. As a people pleasing perfectionist that adorned my self worth with my ability to make money for others and “do a good job” was inherently all I had ever known as an adult, and in many ways as a kid too.

A Time Of Growth

This community opened my eyes to ask questions like, who is my whole person, beyond being good at marketing and business growth strategies? 

The authentic and raw relationships I encountered within the WordPress community showed me that choosing between good business and being a good human could sustainably co habitate. There are good people doing good business, and my corporate experience had not really shown me that side of what is economically sustainable. There was a thirst to do things the right way. 

I began aligning with clients and teams who shared my values, opening doors to remote work and global collaboration.

The access to remote work, remote culture, and the discovery of a global community that shared these values, promoting work life balance as well as viable technology products and services became key skills beyond marketing that I was able to foster and that would help me propel myself for years to come. 

The combination of being good at my job within the reliable ecosystem of web tech provided stability to continue to work in the remote world.

Ultimately this safety gave me the freedom to begin to reconciling my own growth as a person and my growth as a professional, beyond the growth in pipelines for my clients.

When COVID-19 hit, my experience in remote work positioned me uniquely. I was able to niche myself as one of few marketers in the world operating in the US that could go beyond successfully executing smart marketing campaigns in a remote environment – but I could build remote culture, manage global asynchronous teams and empower dozens of others to be successful at marketing, sales, customer support, account management and talent acquisition too. 

I leveraged this to diversify beyond web tech clients and found bio tech, climate tech, and ag tech companies to even further align my passions with my skills and my conscience as an ethical, sustainable marketer. 

My underlying passions for teaching and sharing my expertise continued to serve me as I became a Fractional CMO. I was an early adopter of this framework of employment and the balance it gave me pushed me more and more into my own personal growth.

The Future

About 3 years ago the work-life balance lines blurred further as I got better at managing my time, my passions, my teams, expertise and work product. I was finally ready to grow up as a marketing agency owner. I sunset MKConsulting, and Frameworks MKTG entered the market. We broker marketing, sales, and growth talent off and on as needed for one person marketing departments around the world. 

Through it all, I’ve had my heart broken while working with climate tech and bio tech clients. But web tech has been a great home to grow in, and that is largely because the WordPress community connecting me to amazing humans, all around the world.

I’m more confident than ever that showing up as my fully authentic self is what keeps me happy. When I can keep my family, friends, clients, teammates, and investors happy we all stay much more aligned to thrive. Thriving is a natural byproduct when I get to be real, and to maintain my stress levels and just do what I do.  

Coming to this clear view of what my professional timeline can be is once again, life changing.

I will not waste the opportunities afforded to me, I am determined to become the best version of my whole human self. I’m determined to continue being a part of proving how sustainable business growth is possible and reliable.

So thank you, WordPress community.  You are the fertile soil in which I got to grow. 

Love yall. See ya in Slack.
Or maybe another WC somewhere.
Or maybe come visit me in Texas.