Meghan Donnelly

I have severe ADHD, diagnosed when I was young, and I kind of fell into the world of technology because of that challenge with my own brain and the organization and hyperactivity. Technology and systems and processes have really helped me develop as a person in my lifestyle, as well as my career. In my early 20s, I started out as a front-end developer, building systems and websites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, all that geeky stuff. I met my mentor in my 20s, a back-end developer who challenged me to learn how to hand code HTML and CSS. He took me under his wing because I have this eye for design as well as the technical side of things, which is very rare. This is why they call me a unicorn, and my company is called the Digital Unicorns, because I have both the creative and the analytical and technical side of things and can do both of them. We were contracting for companies like Sony and Toshiba, some of these really big tech companies 20 years ago, building systems and UI interfaces for them. On the side, I was building websites for small businesses locally here in Wisconsin, just getting as much hands-on experience as possible. Then corporate America found me. I started working for a startup in the Johnson Creek area, a federally regulated smoke juice company, where I was their first digital person and grew their sales 125% in 8 months, which was faster than LinkedIn grew as a whole company that entire year. Then Springs Window Fashions, the number one lifestyle manufacturer in the world, found me. I was their first digital hire. They were very old school, and when they brought me on as a digital person, it kind of shook things up. I sat right in between marketing and the development team, ran their web team, and then got promoted and ran the UX, and then got promoted again. I was promoted 3 times in less than 2 years. I had my daughter young when I was in my early twenties, so that was the push to get a serious career. My mom babysat, she made me finish college, and I ended up with two associate degrees instead of a full bachelor's degree because there were multiple things I was doing. By the time I was in my late twenties, I had 4 kids. So I'm doing this career and building this family at the same time. Corporate America was great when it was great, and then it was horrible when it was horrible. Because of my ADHD, corporate's really not a great place for me because I don't fit into a box. I'm very much outside of the box. After the first two years of corporate, it went downhill because I was miserable, working 65 to 70 hours a week, never saw my kids. When I left that job, I started building Salesforce implementations and worked for a couple startups doing that, but Salesforce is horrible, I'm not a fan. It just wasn't a good fit for me either. After that last startup, I was done. I took my severance and started contracting and doing my own thing, building my own company. I got really lucky because I had so many connections in the tech world at a corporate level, CTOs and VPs that still wanted to work with me. For that first couple of years, I was able to use those connections and get some really big projects. Then I had to figure out how to market myself and sell myself and build a brand. I started building systems, integrations, and automation systems for SMBs, small to medium-sized businesses who were established, had been in business for 5 years, multi-six figures, and their back-end systems and operations were just a mess. People with 12 different softwares running their company, and we were simplifying them down. I built a small team up and had a few successful years. Then I stumbled upon how horrible CRMs are out there today, and that's when Digital Magic came around. I was like, all of these suck, I need a platform. None of these businesses actually use their CRM. You would be surprised how many have Salesforce and HubSpot and all these things in place, and nobody uses them, nobody checks them, nobody updates them. The executives who should be using them because there's so much data and insights in there if they're set up correctly, they don't use them. That's a huge gap.