I’ve never been one to stay put for too long. My mom, dad, sister and I moved around quite a bit. Twenty residences, seven states, two countries. My father met his southern belle at the Officer’s club while he was stationed at the Charleston, SC naval base. Beauty and the Bull got married, had two children. You’ve heard this story before.
When you move around so much, the nuclear family is all you’ve got. You come to learn that a place is just a place, a home just a house. Transience became a way of life. Cardboard boxes never really went away, but became play areas or spaceships in addition to storage in the basement or garage that you never quite get around to “putting away.”
I moved to Rochester in 2012 for work, a different company than the one I’m with now. Training and customer satisfaction had become my work role, finding ways to engage customer experience teams to meet and exceed customer expectations. Working with new and existing employees, you start to see the pattern of necessary reinvention and evolution at the workplace. Luckily, change for me was just part of life.
2020 and 2021 has brought uncomfortable change for a lot of people. If 2020 was the year of the pivot, 2021 is turning into the year of transition. A shocking number of indicators point to this, including several years of continuous declines of the working-age population, a “quits rate” 24% higher than it was pre-pandemic, and new business formations at a 15-year high. Not excluded from this constant undertow of change, our family of three is also undergoing new beginnings, as my wife and I are expecting another boy to soon join our first.
Late in 2020, Steven James offered me a position as Director of Client Relations. Honestly, I don’t recall the exact words, but, after all my moves over the years, I definitely remember that the sentiment was one that said, “Welcome Home”.
I’m privileged to work with these colleagues for our clients. I don’t think I’ve ever met a group of people more dedicated, more passionate, or more thoughtful about the work partnerships they build than this team at SJMG. If you want to see what finely tuned creativity in a marketing partner can do for your business, the salesperson in me says “Just give us a call, you’ll see the difference.” The human in me says, “The Sunday Sauce is on, come on over. Welcome to the family.”
