Lindsey Perron

I've been working in marketing since around 2012, though my path here wasn't traditional. I originally went to school for human services, which is a lot like social work, but my dad had been in sales and marketing his whole life, so I'd always been around it. When I was faced with becoming a mother and human service positions weren't paying well, my dad, who was running a full-service marketing agency, asked if I wanted to post blogs for extra money on the side. That evolved into doing social media, and it just kept building until they had a full-time position need. I came on full-time and was front-facing the clients and project managing internally with a full 20-person team. I found there's a lot of psychology in marketing too, so my human service degree oddly had similarities - understanding people, what gets them to move, issues and problems they struggle with, and finding a solution. That's what good marketing should be doing: figuring out what the market's problem is and helping them find a solution through your product or service. I've only been in the food distribution and cooperative industry for just shy of 2 years. The organization I'm at now is a company of a little under 200 people that's been around for 77 years. It started out of World War II pricing issues when bakeries came together and said, let's buy ingredients together so we can get better pricing, and it's just evolved from there. When I joined, although the company was just shy of 80 years old, they'd never done real marketing before - the quote-unquote design software they were using was making stuff in Microsoft Word. Getting them to really trust that I knew what I was doing and bringing what to a lot of companies probably wouldn't be viewed as new ideas, but for them, having never done marketing before, it was a little scary. But the results have kind of spoken for themselves. A little over a year in, the marketing manager was let go, and they offered me that position.