Category: Just me being me

After a much needed week off from pretty much everything (including blogging), I’m back!

This past year went by so quickly and I was surprised when I got an email from my blogging site that congratulated me on 77 posts. That’s a lot of posts! I mean, I’m no Younghouselove posting 2 times each weekday, but I’m pretty proud of myself for keeping this going since last March.

My goal for 2012 is to post at least two times each week and get to a total of 125 posts for the year. With a new job, new baby, new house and lots of marketing/business stuff thrown in there for good measure, I should have a lot to talk about!

Oh wait, did I say new house?

If you’ve been following along with my saga, you already know that we sold our townhouse in October. However, since I also lost my job around the same time, we couldn’t buy a new house and instead moved into a rental. As luck would have it, I landed a new job pretty quickly and started in early December.

Even though we weren’t really *looking* for houses, I was still using redfin.com on a regular basis to keep track of what was out there and save potential winners to my account favorites. On Christmas Day, my husband and I drove around to our top 10 houses to check out (um…by this I mean stalk) the neighborhoods. Based on our drive-by, we were able to knock a bunch of houses off the list and also mark down two of our absolute favorites.

Since I was off work between Christmas and New Year’s, I went and toured our remaining top six houses with our real estate agent (who also happens to be my aunt) and my mom. The two houses from our drive-by favorite list were pretty great inside too – so I set up a second showing so that my husband and father (a custom home builder who wanted to “kick the tires”) could see them.

We came up with one clear winner – a house that meets almost every single piece of our ‘dream house’ criteria.

It’s on two acres of land, has a four car garage (yes, my husband is doing a happy dance), a beautiful kitchen with granite, and plenty of rooms inside to meet our needs. There are a number of projects that need to be done to really make the house perfect for us, mostly wallpaper removal, painting, buying a new oven and dishwasher, and completely renovating an ugly bathroom. It’s all pretty doable though, since I love a good project to focus on.

After much deliberation, we decided to go for it. We submitted our contract early this morning (after signing a few dozen sheets of paper last night around midnight) and now we’re waiting to hear if they accept our offer or will be sending through a counter-offer. Since the property is available immediately, we could go to settlement by the end of the month. Which seems absolutely incredible if you think of what a mess everything was just a few months ago!

We hope to hear something back from their agent soon, so I’ll be trying to keep my mind off of it for the rest of the day. Yeah….as if that’s possible. I admit I’ve pretty much drawn out plans for decorating each room of the house already. Cross your fingers that I don’t get my heart broken!

I’ve written about LinkedIn a couple times before and have stressed that I feel it is important to complete your entire profile, as well as keep it updated to your current position.  While looking for a new job I noticed that people really do keep tabs on your LinkedIn status. In fact, some of my LinkedIn connections were even kind enough to send me encouraging notes and leads for marketing positions.

If you have your own LinkedIn profile, or just stalked other people’s, you may have noticed that there is an area for recommendations. This is a handy dandy way that former co-workers/clients/contacts can recommend you for your previous or current job position.

Well written recommendations can be extremely beneficial because they are visible for anyone to see, whether it is by your new boss, potential new clients or your proud mom.

You can receive these recommendations in a few different ways: someone can out of the blue decide to recommend you for a job well done; you can ask someone that you’ve worked with to recommend you; or you can recommend someone in the hopes that they return the favor.

In 2009 when I was getting my feet wet on LinkedIn, I recommended three different contacts. One of them returned the favor with a very nice recommendation for my page. Over the years, I asked a few more close contacts if they would mind recommending me, but nothing ever came of it and I didn’t want to nag them about it.

When I lost my job this Fall, one of my contacts made it a point to call me up and tell me how much he enjoyed working with me over the years. Since I had just recently updated my LinkedIn profile, it was the perfect opportunity to ask him if he’d mind recommending me. He said that he’d love to and promptly added a positive review to my profile.

I felt pretty awesome, having two recommendations on my page. I mean, I totally realize that others may have way more, but I was happy to have any at all. And as I mentioned before, positive reinforcement to a marketing person is like fluffy puppies, homemade cookies and lit Christmas trees all at once!

As I’ve said before, I’ve been doing some freelance work for the past few months and have been having a wonderful time with one of my clients in particular. I’ve done a couple social media blitz plans for him and just recently designed a postcard series  and email marketing campaign for one of his association’s upcoming workshops (more on that next week). We have excellent rapport and he has seemed genuinely happy and appreciative of the work I’ve been doing for him. This of course, makes me like him even more because he says “thank you” and “you’re amazing” a lot.

When I asked him if he’d mind writing a recommendation to go under my consulting position on my LinkedIn page, he said that he thought that was a great idea. Then, like many of my ideas – I promptly forgot about it.

Yup, it totally slipped my mind until a few days later when he sent in his recommendation:

“If you hire Julie and don’t like what you get, I will cover the cost. That is my guarantee that Julie will produce what you want. Julie is a person who gets results. I hired her for an 11th hour challenge that she completed successfully with a sense of direction and enthusiasm. That was the beginning of a working partnership with the Regional Manufacturing Institute (RMI) that continues today. Julie has many expert qualities. Her work is outstanding in terms of quality, timeliness and exactness. Her ability to size up a problem and produce a solution is almost magical. She is fast, focused and friendly, which means working with her is a joy. She works well in ambiguous situations with a firm grasp of the big picture. She is both an inventor and architect, creating solutions and building blocks that lead to success. Structure and clarity are tools she uses well to bring about results that, in the case of her work with RMI, always exceeded my expectations.” – Recommended by Michael Galiazzo on December 10, 2011.

When I read his words, I honestly got choked up and had to sing a happy little song in my head to keep from crying. It is honestly the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my work performance or my work ethic in my entire life. Now, don’t get me wrong, I get lots of positive reinforcement and love in my non-work life, but the world of a marketing director is much more bountiful with blame then it is compliments. The fact that my client felt so comfortable with me and pleased with my work that he wrote the recommendation that he did means the world to me.

Since we’re smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, this is a terrific opportunity for you to take 5 minutes and spread the happiness.

If you have someone you’ve done business with that you would recommend in conversation with a friend or colleague – whether it is a client, an employee you really enjoyed working with, a vendor with fair prices, or more – take a couple minutes to recommend them on their LinkedIn page.

You’re not only giving their other contacts insight into their work ethic, but you might also make their day!

Now that I’ve spent a week and a half at my new position, I’m starting to settle in a bit more.

My office is starting to feel like I live there, with the addition of my fabulous Cotton Monster, my special little filing system and tunes from my iPod. At this point I feel comfortable enough with the other employees that I can chat with them without feeling like a total idiot. Oh, and I totally know where the nearby bathrooms are located, so that rocks.

Obviously this early in the process I can’t do a full apples-to-apples comparison of my old position vs. my new one, but I can very easily list my top 3 reasons why my new job is currently the winner:

1.       Attainable Goals are Awesome
Starting a new position is scary, even more so when it’s a little bit different than previous jobs you’ve worked throughout your career. In every position I’ve ever held, I’ve pretty much been thrown into an ocean of crap and told to sink or swim with little or no direction. Imagine my surprise, when I actually received a copy of my job description, clear expectations and goals, and a project list of tasks to start on. So, not only do they tell me what is expected of me, but they give me a roadmap to follow? What a concept!

2.       Convenient Food Options Hit the Spot
At my last office, I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t bring lunch and then had no time to run out and grab something. Usually my only options were to scrounge around in my desk drawers for anything left in my stash, or raid the snack machine. Neither option was a good one and usually just left me hungrier and angry (like a hormonal Hulk). Well, my new office wins again – there’s a little restaurant in my building! They have breakfast and lunch options, as well as various snacks available. And the best part is… there’s a Starbucks in there too!

3.       They Like Me for Me
At no point during the last week and a half have I been told to: be a cheerleader, make my personality more like the last girl in the position, or try harder to make everyone like you. Believe me, there are many, many, many more inappropriate and awful things that were told to me about my personality over the last few years, but I truly just realized that I don’t have to hear it anymore. It’s like I’ve finally been released from years of incarceration and am reentering society – I’m afraid to make a wrong step or I’ll get shanked, but everyone is actually a lot nicer on the outside. Granted, it hasn’t been very long but everyone I’ve meet and worked with so far has been genuinely nice to me, without me having to jump through hoops to try and win them over.

So, as much as I wish I could have walked away from my last position on my own accord instead of being laid off, I truly do feel like I picked a winner.

Isn’t it funny how we can be so scared of change that we stay somewhere that isn’t a good fit? For years I was unhappy and ready to move on, but too nervous to actually take the leap and do it. Like an abusive relationship, the insanity started to feel normal to me.

But now, my eyes are opened to so many other opportunities that are out there. I absolutely loved doing freelance work and have kept on a couple of my clients to work for in my spare time. I’m really enjoying the fresh challenges of my new position.

Will I stay here forever? Will I leave and start up my own consulting firm in the next couple years? Is there something else that I haven’t even considered? I guess we’ll just have to see where this adventure takes us!