Her Story
About Rachel
My career journey has been intentional and strategic from the start. I graduated from the University of Alabama with a double major in marketing and finance, plus a minor in sales. I was so involved with the university's number one ranked sales program that they offered to pay for my master's degree and made me the lead graduate assistant, where I handled corporate communications and graded over 100 sales pitches per week. Coming out of school, I knew I wanted to build a strong foundation in sales before pursuing marketing, so I could understand how to carry the bag from the sales side. I spent about a year at an automated manufacturing company selling logistics products, which gave me that crucial sales experience. Then I transitioned to Ray Ward, a full-service marketing agency here in Charlotte, where I worked as a strategic planner in paid media for over 3 years. This role gave me a comprehensive foundation across display, search, social, content, SEO, and creative, primarily working in the B2B space and home and building industry. After realizing I wanted product-side experience, I moved to Honeywell as a Senior Marketing Strategist for a year. Then this incredible opportunity at Switchback Medical came through my network, and I saw it as a chance to slingshot my career forward into management. Now I'm managing marketing and business development for 3 separate companies under the Switchback umbrella, building their marketing programs from the ground up and proving the value of marketing to a company of engineers. I'm only in my third week, but I'm already diving deep into data analytics, website performance, organic LinkedIn, and SEO strategy, creating a crawl-walk-run plan for the next one to three years based on solid marketing analytics and data.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Rachel
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say, don't be afraid to voice your opinions. A lot of times, there are loud voices in the room, but those loud voices aren't necessarily correct on the way that things should be going. So don't be afraid to speak up and say what is on your mind, because a lot of times, it's probably going to be a fantastic idea or spark a conversation. Speaking up has led to very meaningful conversations and ideas and brainstorming for me, versus a lot of people that would just want to be the loudest in the room, which isn't necessarily meaningful. So don't be afraid to speak up and take up space in the rooms that you enter.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I would say challenges and opportunities for me right now are both kind of rooted in AI. It's a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI is taking away some of those entry-level jobs where people get really good experience coming out of college, because a lot of it can be automated. This is leading to a gap in the workforce, where companies want to hire people with mid-range experience, but there's not a lot of that now because AI is limiting some of those jobs. But on another level, AI also helps me a ton with marketing strategies and building out content. Where I used to have to go to content folks at an agency and it would take a long time to build things out, now I can manage all of that with just one to two people. Marketing strategy decks that I used to spend weeks on, I'm now cutting down tremendously. So it's making things a lot faster and more efficient.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I would say honesty and relationship building are most important to me. What I like to tell the people that I work with, and this has come from managers before me and how I like to manage now, is that at the end of the day, we're all human. Jobs can come and go, but at the end of the day, treating people like they're humans, and they have lives and relationships, and knowing that that is the priority, and that a job is a job. Creating those relationships and asking how people are doing, how's your life, that's really helped me get far in my career because people want to work with you a lot more when you've had that foundation of a relationship and culture and caring about them, not just being there to do a job for me. People want to do a lot more when you care about them.
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