When I was laid off from my job in December 2022, I was forced to confront a long-held desire to be a true entrepreneur. After years of leading digital transformation at brand manufacturing companies, I was frustrated with the slow pace of change and corporate resistance to new ideas. But that layoff turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, as it led to the creation of Kinetic Kaleidoscope. This is the story of how I went from Broadway Baby to Northwestern, became a marketer and intrapreneur, and eventually started my own company to help other businesses succeed.
As I continue on this journey, I'm reminded that my creative and artistic background isn't just a footnote to my career but a central part of who I am as a marketer and entrepreneur. Today, as I develop custom marketing solutions for my clients, I'm once again able to draw on the same creativity and storytelling skills that led me to the stage all those years ago.
My passion for singing started at a young age, and I was priviledged to have had the opportunity to pursue it early on. I began performing for large audiences at the age of six, and I continued to hone my skills as a singer, dancer, and actor. During high school, I was the state champion in the Oregon Solo Competition, which further fueled my love of performing.
Eventually, I received a music scholarship to attend Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, I starred in numerous on-campus productions, including playing the lead role in "Evita". This was a pivotal moment in my life. I was surrounded by other talented and passionate performers. And as the leading lady, I was challenged in new ways as a leader of a big cast and crew in the largest student-produced musical in America.
Northwestern was also where I discovered that context switching was my superpower. As a student, I focused on music and theatre, but my liberal arts education gave me a broader perspective on the world and how it could inform my creative work. I found that I thrived in an environment where a concept I learned in Poli Sci gave me a new idea for a scene study. This cross-disciplinary approach to learning and creating gave me a unique perspective that I would carry with me throughout my career. Northwestern was the beginning of seeing myself as a Kinetic Kaleidoscope, and life as a dynamic learning lab.
After college, I headed to New York City, the ultimate destination for performers looking to make it big. I quickly immersed myself in the Broadway scene and started pounding the pavement in search of opportunities. Back-to-back auditions, where I had less than a minute to persuade a group of jaded casting directors to hire me out of thousands of other talented actors, helped me develop the thickest of thick skin. And I needed "survival jobs" to make ends meet.
One of my first ventures was pitching the "Showmancing" column concept to BackStage.com My idea was "Sex and the City meets struggling artists," and it was a way to combine my love of performing with my passion for writing. The column became a hit, and it gave me a chance to explore the industry from a different perspective and share the unique journey my friends and I were on.
My main performing gig was with the USO Liberty Belles World Troupe, a 3-woman show based on the Andrews Sisters, which toured all over the world to perform for veterans and active-duty military. In addition to performing, we had to be "always on" as ambassadors for the USO who traveled in full costume and makeup. They actually docked our pay if our nails weren't painted red by the time the car to the airport arrived. While I had the honor of performing for dignitaries, including the President of the United States, it was the everyday military personnel that left the biggest impression on me. Exposure to a different lifestyle than my own left me humbled, and I wrote about it in a BackStage Magazine article titled "I'll Be Seeing Them."
To get decent health insurance, I also started temping at Warburg Pincus, a highly-pedigreed Private Equity firm, where I booked executive's travel and filed expense reports. But I became interested in the business, and started reading all of the prospectuses lying around. Before long, I was helping out the Marketing team and staying late with the young grunts (my peers) who were pulling all nighters doing due diligence for big deals.
As I continued to work for Warburg Pincus, I found myself gradually spending more time on corporate projects than on theater work, which was supposed to be my dream. While the transition didn't happen overnight, it eventually became clear to me where my true passion lay. The deciding moment came down to the color blue.
During the day, I was tasked with getting the perfect printed collateral for our annual meeting, which required matching the exact pantone of our Warburg Pincus brand blue color. My desk was filled with paint swatches and printed samples from multiple vendors, and I was obsessed with getting it right for the very hard-to-please SVP of Marketing.
By night, I was in an audition-only master class with Craig Carnelia, workshopping songs. In one of the pieces I was working on, my character sang about wanting to swim in a clear blue stream, and Craig encouraged me to visualize the blue stream and see it clearly as I sang. But every time I closed my eyes, all I could see were the different Warburg Pincus brand blue color samples on my desk. This was the moment I realized that my heart and passion lay in the corporate world, where I could channel my creative energy into something more substantial and enduring than fleeting performances.
But I knew I needed formal business training to take my career to the next level. So, I made the decision to pursue an MBA. And what better place to do that than deep in the heart of Texas?
At the McCombs School of Business, I had the opportunity to learn from some of the most knowledgeable and experienced professors in the field, make lifelong friends, and indulge in some of the best times of my life. As part of the MBA Journal program, I also had the chance to write for Business Week, building on my writing experience at BackStage.com.
As a McCombs Venture Fellow, I had the privilege of receiving specialized education on entrepreneurship and venture capital, while also interning at a local private equity firm. Despite my love for the program, I often struggled with imposter syndrome, given my nontraditional background. I downplayed my unique and creative background in an effort to be taken more seriously as a student and a business person.
Looking back, I regret not embracing my experiences and recognizing the value it could bring to the program and to a future employer. Fortunately, I'm not wired to hide my light under a bushel for too long, and that former actor would soon re-emerge as I started my journey at General Electric, where another former actor, Ronald Reagan, once worked as the company's spokesperson.
After completing my MBA, I was eager to jump into the world of startups or venture capital and private equity. But fate had other plans. I discovered GE's Experienced Commercial Leadership program, which was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain a "vocational MBA" and develop the skills I needed to become a sales and marketing leader. Sponsored by then-CEO Jeff Immelt, the program consisted of three, eight-month rotations in different business units, as well as hundreds of hours of classroom training and travel all over the world, including to China and Argentina.
The program was intense and challenging, but it taught me how to lead and inspire others, and how to think creatively about solving complex business problems. It also exposed me to a diverse array of industries and helped me develop a deep understanding of global markets and trends. And one trend emerged and caught hold of me so tightly that I bet my whole career on it: Digital
Early on in my time at GE, I became enamored with digital. As a commercial leader, I believed it was crucial to understand how to market and sell products and services online, as the world was quickly moving in that direction. Despite pushback from mentors who dismissed digital as the realm of the communications team or the summer intern, I remained convinced of its importance. As a marketer, I understood that it was critical to understand our target users, find them, connect with them, and convince them to buy. The digital revolution was changing every facet of this process, and it didn't make sense to cede it to IT.
This focus on digital proved to be a shrewd move, as I and a few other "Digital ECLPs" known for our expertise in this emerging practice were among the most sought-after graduates from the program. I landed a role leading digital transformation for GE's $5 billion transportation business.
As a digital leader within GE, I faced resistance and skepticism from many of my colleagues. But I persevered, connecting with other digital leaders throughout the company and advocating for meaningful change from within. At a global digital summit in 2012, we predicted that within 10 years, there would be no need to call it "digital marketing" anymore - it would just be "marketing." Little did we realize that we'd still be advocating for Digital more than a decade later with "digital" still used as a qualifier for a certain kind of marketing, rather than a capability baked into the entire function.
During my time at GE Transportation, I led the development of over 15 iPad sales tools for the company. These tools simplified complex product offerings and enabled the sales team to better visualize the value of GE's software and solutions to customers. Each app was treated like a digital product with its own platform roadmap and feature set, and was later leveraged by other GE businesses such as Wind Turbines and Power Generators. Notably, the Durathon Battery Shape Shifter Calculator, which was developed using 3D modeling software MATLAB, was the first-ever mobile app to integrate MATLAB with iOS.
It was during this time that I began to think of myself as an "intrapreneur" - someone who was technically part of a huge corporation but was operating with a startup-like mentality to drive innovation and change. I would take that Intrapreneurial mindset with me to lead digital transformation across a variety of industries and business models.
GE left an indelible mark on me, but after so many years in B2B marketing, I wanted exposure to the a new challenge in the world of consumer goods. Over the course of a decade, I led digital strategy and execution for a range of brand manufacturing companies, helping them navigate the evolving digital landscape and drive growth across multiple channels. Through this work, I honed my expertise in all aspects of digital strategy and execution, from building cross-functional teams to optimizing the customer experience across touchpoints.
My first stop after GE was leading digital marketing for Central's Garden Division, which encompassed six P&Ls and 15 CPG brands, including Pennington and Amdro. One of my biggest achievements was overhauling the MarTech infrastructure to migrate over 60 websites to Sitecore CMS. This not only reduced our reliance on IT, but also cut costs by $1.5M over two years. I also replaced the agency of record with Contently, which enabled us to scale content creation by 10X while simultaneously reducing costs by more than 50%. Collaborating with Contently was my first taste of being a beta customer of new MarTech solutions. I found I loved being a beta user helping to shape emerging SaaS companies as they evolved and solidified product-market fit. We also were early customers of a social media startup called InsightPool, which was later acquired by TrendKite and then Cision. Building on the theme of bringing marketing operations in-house, I spearheaded a strategy and process to transition social media management to an in-house team, saving the company $250K annually and reducing the average cost per engagement from $4.15 to $0.28.
As the newly created Director of Digital Marketing at Elekta, I was tasked with defining the company's digital strategy and building out the team. My mission was to bring a digital transformation to the company and modernize its digital presence.
In just one year, I defined and optimized Elekta's MarTech stack, which went on to win an industry award. I also created a new team structure that quadrupled output while reducing headcount from 8 to 5, ensuring maximum efficiency and productivity.
The newest addition to Elekta's MarTech stack was an early stage SaaS company called Seismic in an emerging "Sales Enablement" category. We integrated Seismic with our marketing ecosystem and launched it to over 400 commercial users with an adoption rate of 92%, which helped to enhance and accelerate the selling cycle and customer penetration rates among large B2B accounts. Our efforts were even featured in a Seismic case study. In addition to loving the chance to be a beta customer again, Seismic will always hold a special place in my heart for making me feel like a movie star on the day of the shoot (even if I had a horrible cold and sound terrible).
As part of my role, I also led the development of Elekta Care Community, a Salesforce.com Service Cloud customer portal, for Elekta's 6,000 hospital customers. The portal was instrumental in providing customers with a seamless experience and helped to improve customer satisfaction rates. My team and I also worked closely with Product Management to develop content and campaigns articulating unique selling propositions, including over 30 product webinars and the $1.2M Elekta Innovation Theatre, an immersive tradeshow experience. These efforts helped to raise brand awareness and drive product sales.
Over my time at Elekta, these efforts grew the customer database by 23% and augmented data to improve segmentation and targeting, resulting in over 30% open rates, surpassing the 20% industry benchmark. These results were a testament to the effectiveness of our digital marketing strategies and campaigns.
As the leader of the Digital Customer Experience ("DCX") team at Oregon Tool, I was responsible for defining and executing the company's eCommerce strategy and developing digital marketing programs to support all of our selling efforts. With a focus on optimizing our existing channels and adding new ones, we tripled global eCommerce revenue from 2018 to 2021 for our flagship Oregon brand. Our products consistently outperformed the category with share and impression gains over larger competitors.
But this growth didn't just happen overnight. It was the result of a comprehensive omnichannel strategy that required a lot of cross-functional leadership to execute. I worked closely with teams across the organization to maximize our people, time, and talent. We developed a roadmap that focused on all the "flavors of eCommerce," including D2C, marketplaces like Amazon, retail.com, and B2B/direct accounts. We also implemented a Marketplace Controls program to combat the issues that arose from third-party sellers online.
Beyond defining our strategy, I was responsible for developing and executing our digital marketing programs, which played a crucial role in driving our incremental growth. We launched full-funnel advertising programs across Over The Top/Connected TV video, social & influencer, paid search, retail media, and native/custom content partnerships. These efforts helped us achieve an average ROAS of over $10 in 2021, a 14% improvement over the previous year.
This was by far the most challenging role of my career because I had so many cross-functional stakeholders relying on me to set a direction and manage through what sometimes felt like a deadlocked immunity to change. At one point, I made a map of all of the employees touched significantly by DCX at the request of our CEO. My first attempt included more than 100 people and the printout more than covered the board room table!
By far the best Digital Customer Experience project from my time at Oregon Tool was the development of a next-generation Part Finder, the ufoundit™ Saw Chain Finder, which tackled the biggest point of friction for end-users in finding the right part to fit their equipment. As a primarily replacement parts company, finding the right part that fits the equipment was the biggest point of friction for our end-users. To simplify the process, we developed the ufoundit™ Saw Chain Finder, which did not require users to know their model number. This patent-pending tool educates users to find the right part in as few steps as possible and drills down to the one part they need.
As the leader of the project, I spearheaded the development and launch of the patent-pending application. We datamined ufoundit to optimize our ad campaigns and customer selling stories. 24% of users found the right part and clicked "Buy Now," leading them to a Product Detail Page on our website displaying all retailers selling the product. This information led senior leadership to bring website fulfillment in-house so users could buy from us directly in <2 minutes. 16% of all ufoundit users added our product to their cart.
After leading digital transformation at brand manufacturing companies for years, I grew increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of change and resistance from Corporate IT departments. But it wasn't until I was laid off as part of a series of reductions in force at Oregon Tool in December 2022 that I realized I wanted to be a true entrepreneur.
Initially, I thought I would take some time off to recharge my batteries and then pursue another full-time corporate job. But it didn't take long for me to realize that I didn't want to return to the same old routine. For the first time since my BackStage and Business Week days, I started creating content for myself and sharing my unique perspective with the world. This led to the creation of Corporate Karaoke, a series where I take popular songs and rewrite and perform them with new lyrics based on corporate situations. I became addicted to the freedom of creating without decision by committee. No brand police except myself.
Through my content, I connected with entrepreneurs developing Digital Customer Experience technologies that were light-years ahead of the monolith platforms I had been stuck with. I discovered a wide-open world of possibility, one that I might have saved millions of dollars and incalculable frustration had I known about earlier.
That's when I had a realization. I know the MarTech space and their target buyer: the Digital Leader desperate for new technology and better ways of working. Implementing new Marketing Technology was a consistent highlight of my career. Now, I want to help MarTech companies reach people like me with great marketing programs. That's how Kinetic Kaleidoscope was born. It's a marketing consultancy that provides fractional CMO services to MarTech companies selling to large enterprises. My experience implementing innovative marketing technology to drive a better customer experience makes me uniquely qualified to help these companies succeed.
It's time to take the leap and embrace the entrepreneurial spirit that has been inside of me all along.