Advice from Previous Generations

Episode Transcript

Julia: Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms Podcast. This week, Kelly and I have a special episode, dedicated to the people who helped us most in our careers, and the intersection of our professional and personal journeys. So, we both spent time with both of our mothers and our fathers, asking them questions about their journey, in life in business, and then also kind of pulling out their best advice.

Kelly: It's really and this was a super fun episode. For me, I think a lot of unexpected things came out of the episode in terms of some of the things that our parents said and some of their career paths and the good and the bad, and the ugly of things that happened along the way. Our parents had very different career paths than we did. Our mothers clearly had less opportunities than we did based on the time. However, your mom was able to carve out a place in the working world very early on for herself, which was extremely unique. Can you tell me a little bit about her story?

Julia: Yeah, my mom is a very headstrong person. I feel like that's where my sister and I are her daughters in that way. And a lot of our conversation, I'm going to do an overview of who we are, you know, kind of her journey but a lot of what I talked to with my mom, I felt like it was harkening back to our episode with Joanne Lublin about power moms because I really wanted to know, you know, she's a boomer, I'm a millennial, I really wanted to know, you know, I mean, I figured it would be like, some of the stuff that they talked about, that she, you know, she got from her interviews. My mom is from New York, and she went to undergrad and grad school in New York, upstate New York. And then she originally started in computer programming, back when computers were the size of rooms, and then moved to her true passion, which is geology. So, she has always been working in the environmental field. And she met my dad when they were both working in New York City. And so she was, you know, working nine to five, with her shoulder pads. And, you know, then obviously, they started a family and my mom was a working mom, you know, so when I had kids, my mom told me lots of stories about, you know, pumping in her office. And, you know, not only was she a mom, a young mom in a very male industry, but she was, you know, trying to breastfeed and trying to be home for her kids. So, you know, like Joanne Lublin says, she was paving the way. And then eventually, she did step her toe out of work for a little while, but then eventually went back full time and just recently retired. So, a lot of our conversations were about how did she follow her passion? She talks a lot about mentors which we have talked a lot about on this podcast, and my dad talks about mentors too, you'll hear about that in a second. So, let's take a listen to a couple of the gems my mom gave us.

Julia: So, my first question is, what obstacles did you have to overcome? Because you were a woman?

Dawn: Well, I'll probably surprise you with the first obstacle. But it wasn't the working world. It was my parents. My parents were high school graduates, both high school graduates, and they were pretty smart. I think they could have gone to college if they had had the money, but they were children of the depression. And so, they did not have money. And they got married when they were in their late — I think my dad was 19 and my mom was 20. So, when I told them that I wanted to go to college, it was like my mom said, women don't need to go to college, their husbands will support them for the rest of their lives. Your brother needs to go to college because he will have a family to support. And I mean by that I was pretty strong willed. And so, I basically said I'm going to go to college mom and dad, too bad, so sad. And to their credit, they accepted that and they paid for my college. As it turned out, my brother never got married, didn't have a family to support other than himself, but I did. I had a family to support and there were times during my marriage where my husband was not working, and I was the breadwinner. So, it turned out that I needed the college education, after all. So that was one major obstacle that I was able to surmount pretty early.

Something that facilitated my career was I had a whole series of mentors in my life. And I think that's an important thing for people. I'll talk about that later. But the mentors really helped my career.

Julia: What is your legacy as a working woman in your generation?

Dawn: Let me put it in the context. When I finally, as you said, I started ramping up once we moved to Washington, DC, I started ramping up some of my work and I got an opportunity — one of my old bosses in New York City offered me work. And I started commuting back and forth between Washington DC and New York City, leaving on a jet plane, going up to New York, staying the week up there and then flying back on Friday night. And that was very hard on you and your sister. You resented the — at least I sense that you seriously resented — the fact that I was not there for you.

What I tried to do during that time, my legacy to you and I hope to Anna and Kit is I tried to keep the lines of communication with you and your sister open, talk to you. But sit down when I was home and talk to you and listen to your issues. I felt that I needed to do that. And that I hope that you saw me as an example of how, you know, working hard, being self-disciplined, being organized — I know you're very organized — persistent, would lead to success. So, I think that would be the legacy that I hope that you would have gained from my career is that I worked really hard for what I got. I earned every dollar I got, and but I also tried to be a mom too at the same time even though the situation wasn't ideal.

Julia: Well, that certainly was put to the test the past 18 months during the pandemic, because I was a mom and I was the everything all in one house all the time, right? I was literally a mom and a working person all at the same time at this very desk every day. And it was definitely some tough times. But I think you always did a good job. And yes, I hated when you were away.

Dawn: Yeah. Well, that's why I took both of you at least one week up to New York City with me. And then I felt like that was important. You ended up doing work up there, which was really kind of funny.

Julia: What is your biggest career mistake? And what did you learn from it?

Dawn: I think that some would say that I shouldn't have become a stay-at-home mom. But I wanted to spend a lot more time with you, I felt like I had lost your first three years — you, Julia. And I really felt like it was important for me to be home for you, and with Diana, taking care of you for a period. I think that was a wise career choice, not necessarily a mistake. And I think staying home with you and your sister was actually not a mistake. But another move that I needed to make to make me a better person.

Julia: Well, so we go back to when you were first a mom, and you were working when you were in New York City, and you talked about hours, they didn't understand hours, right? What were the other things?

Dawn: Traveling was really difficult. At one point, I had to go to Denver for some project, and you were probably four or five months old, very young. And I was really upset about having to travel and be in Denver, and I was trying to breastfeed and I, you know, I don't even know what I did milk wise. Or when I traveled to Washington, DC and I was coming home from Department of Energy. And I was on the plane and the plane had a breakdown. And I ruined the suit. Because I just leaked all over. It was really awful. So there were no facilities anywhere for breastfeeding — now they have all these little cubes or whatever you want to call them, compartments for breastfeeding moms. I had to make up my own kit to take with ice or whatever — there weren't the ice packs and that kind of thing. So, it made it really difficult. Travel was especially difficult when I traveled back and forth between my home in New Jersey and New York City. Plus, I didn't feel safe in New York City as a pregnant person at that time because you had to walk through Times Square to get to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And it was really sleazy.

Julia: So what do you hope for me and your granddaughters as we look towards some lofty goals, especially like, equal pay for women, better representation by women, maybe more leadership roles by women? Any other things to add to that list?

Dawn: When I was beginning my career, I didn't understand how to value myself in the marketplace. And so, when I went back to work, I was grateful for the rate that I was given, and I really should have said, hey, I need another $30 more, or $20 more. I didn't value myself as I should. And I think women make that mistake a lot — that we don't ask for what we truly deserve. Don't let others define you. Seek out opportunities that fit your skill. So, if somebody wants — you're in the, you know, like, I wanted to do NEPA work, I didn't really want to do hazardous waste work. When I was working for them, they wanted to get out of the military NEPA business. And that's where I wanted to work. So, I went and did what I wanted to do, and not what the corporate people wanted to fit me into. So don't let others define you.

My career was in a growing industry. So, look for a growing industry to get in on the bottom rung and grow with it. Find a mentor. Truly find a mentor wherever you are. I've had about five mentors in my career, and all the way up to my last job, and I still talk to some of these people. And then get a specialized college degree. Don't be a generalist. Too many colleges offer watered down degrees — in the environmental field, they offer these broad environmental management degrees that make you a jack of all trades, master of none.

Julia: Alright, so now let's talk about your mom, Kelly.

Kelly: So, the advice from each of our parents is very different based on their different roles and living in a different generation than we did. And my parents are about 10 years older than your parents. And it was the more traditional path for women to work from home when my mother came into the working world in the 60s, to either take care of their children and then the men would go out to work. And my mother would always tell me that there were only two options for women in the 60s and that was to be a teacher or a nurse, or, of course, a wife and a mom. And those were our options. And so, she became a teacher early on, and then she got married at 26 and became a stay-at-home mom. So early in her career, she started with a very traditional journey as a former English teacher, and a mom of three, but in her early 40s, she discovered athletics. She started running around the block, and then running around the park and eventually trained to do the New York City Marathon and started doing many marathons across the country and then moved on to becoming a triathlete. And she ultimately became a world-champion triathlete in her age division. Since she's been 50–55 years old, she's always been one of the top three triathletes in her age division. She has successfully completed the Iron Man three times, which is insane. She's also done the Israel Man — she was the only woman to do the Israel Man. She's a cancer survivor. And she's also a coach. She started a triathlon club in Denver, Colorado called Team CWW, which is nicknamed Colorado Wild Women, which is very my mother. And she was also voted Coach of the Year. She has two master's degrees. And she has several books published about her traveling career. And together, we've been working on a blog about her experiences called Latent Life. And let's take a little listen to her advice.

Celeste: Advice, okay? This is what I tell the triathletes. And this is what should be your mantra: you put on your own oxygen mask before you help anyone.

Kelly: So that's really funny, because in my last podcast, I said that I would put it on my children before me. But anyway, proceed.

Celeste: You can't help your children. You can't help anybody else if you don't help yourself first. And I think that one thing I felt when I was running, when you would come home from school, and you were seven, I said, I have 10 minutes to myself. 10 minutes to myself — that was a gift. From that 10 minutes to myself, and then I started swimming, I'm in the pool, and there's no telephone in the pool. Nobody can find me. You have to find out what it is that feeds you. My mother, who inspired me to be a mother because she made it so glamorous and she never complained, told me once two things: one, never mow the lawn, and two, always keep some money somewhere of my own. And my father said that when she died, he couldn't believe all the money she had. She became an artist. And she became well-known in Southwest Louisiana. So, she had a gallery and she sold her work. But she got herself satisfied. Because that's what she wanted to do. So, you cannot identify yourself to other people. You have to be you. You have to find out who that is and who you are. And it takes some time and who you are at 18 is not who you're going to be at 21 and at 35. It's a long journey and you keep changing as the decades go, which is a good thing. But the point is to keep your eye on you and stand up for yourself when you are invisible and someone tries to talk you out of something. And I've been able to do that in a variety of ways. And it's been good. But believe in yourself, you're you. There's only one of you, you only have one life. Okay? And one thing is don't do it all at once. If you're a mother, you're going to have to take care of the children somehow, you got to figure out — I'm impressed that Kelly worked and had these two boys at the same time. I have no doubt that that must have done some permanent damage somewhere. I don't know. It's just, I don't know how you did that. But there's the thought to think of you. And Kelly loved her work. And that was her oxygen mask. And through that her children got to see that she was doing what she loved. And therefore, they respected her for doing what she loved and for going off to work.

Kelly: So, Julia, let's now move on and talk about our dads. Let's talk a little bit about your dad John, and his background and some of the advice that you learned from him.

Julia: Yeah, so my mom was obviously my role model in terms of a working woman. But my dad also was a great role model in terms of career and mainly because he was in the marketing world. And that's what I really loved to do even from my high school days. So, my dad grew up in the south, and went to LSU — he actually lived under the stadium, that's a fun fact. He eventually moved to New York, where he met my mom, obviously. While I was a little one, and my mom was a working mom, he also got his MBA at NYU. So, I guess my parents always have shown me the value of hard work. He moved our family down to Washington, DC, he was also doing work in the environmental business in its pioneering days, and worked on projects nationwide, and then he became an owner of his first business 10 years later. And that is also where I kind of absorbed that entrepreneurial spirit, seeing him start things, seeing him literally create something from nothing, and then move on to the next thing. So, we talk a lot about kind of a juxtaposition to my mom, where my mom talks a lot about the mentors that helped propel her forward and how incredibly important those were. My dad, on the other hand — and my mom also got into an industry that was growing originally — my dad did not have mentors. He had to kind of find his way on his own. And he also regretted starting his career in an industry that was not growing, maybe kind of dying. And so, I feel like their perspectives kind of fit together nicely because they have some opposites. So, let's hear a little bit from my dad.

Julia: Where did the whole entrepreneurial journey start for you?

John: I was interested in business school. I went to business school to study accounting and finance, because I knew nothing about those subjects — didn't get any of that in engineering school. And it just started a little when I was in business school, but it just built as I was gaining years of experience working here in Virginia. And certainly, like most people, by the time you're in your 30s, you recognize that if you really want to be highly successful, you better have your own business. And I had thought, and I knew I had to leap off of the employment bandwagon and own a business and prove that I could provide that kind of leadership and business building skills.

Julia: What were your biggest challenges in working your way up the ladder in your career?

John: There was a lot of competition for mentors or sponsors that would try to do their best to help see younger people become successful. And so that was a challenge. I can't say that I had a real solid 100% mentor — had a little bit of mentoring along the way from a handful of people. But to a large degree, I had to keep pulling up my own bootstraps to advance in my career.

Julia: When you look back at your career, do you have any regrets?

John: I wanted to get into the financial industry. And the industry was just not hiring when I finished my business degree. It just happened to be a down cycle and just lasted a year or so. I could have restarted my pursuit of a career in the financial industry, maybe 12 months later, but it didn't dawn on me to do that at the time. So, I just stuck with consulting, which is probably a little bit too bad because I could have made more money in the financial industry.

Julia: What's your biggest regret as an entrepreneur?

John: Well, it'd be nice to take back a lot of the mistakes I made. That's not possible. But the mistakes, of course, are very helpful. They're very enriching. You don't learn so much from your successes, you learn more from your mistakes.

Julia: So, what piece of parting advice would you give to young people starting out their career in marketing?

John: Try to pick an industry that is growing, but not very large yet. If you get in as a junior level person entering an industry that's already peaking, well, there's all kinds of other people that will want to hang on to their jobs, and they're more senior than you are. When the business peaks and starts to decline a little or a lot, you may be forced to move to another industry. And of course, that's very common. But if you're lucky enough to find an industry that is small but growing, that'd be great. That'd be more years for you in that industry.

Julia: All right, Kelly. So now let's hear from your dad. What did you call them — Dickisms?

Kelly: Yes, my dad's name is Richard. But he's called Dick. And so, we call them Dickisms. That is me and my brothers only. He has a lot of things that he would say over and over again, and a lot of them are not repeatable. So we won't be going over them today. But he certainly had a lot of advice. And so just to give you a little background about my dad, he spent decades in the telecom business in the United States where he was most well-known for launching one of the first cell phone companies and one of the largest cable providers in Europe. He worked all over the world in broadband technology. Team sports played a huge role in his life. He played basketball, football, baseball, and track in high school, and then ultimately, he played college football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers — go big red — and he actually played defense to help them win the Orange Bowl in 1964. So that's kind of his claim to fame. Big, huge football fan. And when two of his children went to University of Colorado at Boulder, those were his big rivals. So he would sit on the opposite side of the stadium in his red garb, and we would be on the other side wearing our buffalo garb and watch the Cornhuskers beat us. And so this episode really talks about the influence and advice that my dad had in my own professional career, from the importance of team sports, and its impact on building leadership to value creation to taking risks, surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me. And so both of my parents had a really big impact on both my professional and my personal development. So I want to just kind of go through some of the best advice that my dad has given me over the years because some of it you actually share, because your dad gave you some of that same advice. The first thing that my dad told me very early on was to make sure that I excel at one thing, at least one thing, and of course, he wanted to make sure that we did well academically but in our family, sports was even more important. And sports were important because my dad really felt that team sports was a really great way for kids to learn about leadership and learn about collaboration. And so, he saw a lot of parallels in working on team sports with what he did ultimately in his career and what we both do in our career today. And so sports also became quite easy for me — I followed in his footsteps although I ran track and cross country, not football — and I really used that as a way of creating my own identity and differentiating myself from others early on in school. And Julia, it sounds like your dad had some similar advice on that front in terms of differentiation and making sure you had some sort of focus early on in your school years, is that correct?

Julia: Yeah, I mean my parents always just wanted us to have a commitment to excellence and whatever we chose. So, you know, we've talked about this — I was a runner, maybe not the best runner but I committed myself to training. I still play the viola — I started when I was nine years old. So yeah, for sure.

Kelly: The next thing that my dad talked a lot about was in my career, he encouraged me to look at big cities, to work in a big company if you could early on, and in a big city where there were the most opportunities, which is why I started in Los Angeles. I probably should have started in New York but I preferred the beach over the small spaces in New York City. And so that was one of the second things that he told me. And then the third thing was really about the importance of building equity really outside of your day to day job because you don't create wealth unless you have several streams of income. And so early on in my life, he suggested that I buy a house and stop throwing away money on rent. And so I did buy a place in my 20s in San Francisco. I always talked about a condo I had in Pacific Heights with a nice little view of the Golden Gate Bridge in between two buildings and that really helped me build equity from a very young age so that when I got married I had enough money to put a deposit on a home, which really helped us move things along in our own equity. And Julia, you also followed that path as well and purchased your own home and discovered the importance of those elements too, correct?

Julia: Yeah, except I was in a much different place than you because my generation, if we chose to try to build equity a couple years out of college, was when the market crashed. So, you know, I had kind of the same advice, but probably a different experience and outcome than you.

Kelly: Interesting, different time because I bought my home in the heydays of the 90s, the mid to late 90s, when things started to get crazy, especially in San Francisco with the dot-com craziness. So, I was able to, luckily, make some money based on being at the right place at the right time. And the last point that we both share is my dad really taught me to not be intimidated by men who were in business either above or equal to me. And he did that by taking me on many, many business trips. I went with him to Russia, to Copenhagen, to Mexico, to Germany, and London, many places around the world, and I had an opportunity to have business dinners with his business partners. And that taught me really early on as a teenager, how to comport myself with people who were from a much older generation. And I learned very quickly how to get engaged in conversations and hold my own and have my own point of view. And I think that that helped me a great deal in my career. And I know you had a similar experience with your dad, Julia.

Julia: Yeah, I mean, I always think that hands-on education is so important. When I was in college, I double majored in marketing and entrepreneurship, and part of my entrepreneurship major was a little bit of class time, and then a lot of going out and being with actual business owners, and helping them through whatever they needed, whether it was signage, figuring out e-commerce, that kind of stuff. So, my dad took me on some trips. And in fact, my mom and I talked about it too — she brought me to New York several times. I can't even believe that she left me outside the office in the middle of New York City as like a 13-year-old to go to Duane Reade across the street, which I thought was just so cool. But I think take your kid to work day should not just be a day, it should be a regular practice, because kids really emulate their parents by experience.

Kelly: That's absolutely true. So, let's take a listen to my favorite advice from my dad and his take on differentiation and how important it is to differentiate yourself.

Kelly: You were in the Orange Bowl. Correct. And you won — you caught the winning football at the last game. What was that story?

Dick: Well, I basically caught a couple. We were playing another good team and I got a couple passes towards the end of the game that pushed us over the top.

Kelly: So that helped you win the Orange Bowl in 1964?

Dick: Yes. The other thing I did is I was also playing defensive. And I intercepted a pass that got the ball back to us at the last moment. So, it was one of those things where my athletic prowess — even though I wasn't the best player, I was good enough that I was able to dominate certain phases. And then as I moved from football and basketball to academics into broadband, I was able to learn what I learned with the other stuff to fit it into, you know, who's going to dominate this basketball game. And I ended up being a guy who helped create those kinds of things. And it's one of those things where you could say to yourself, I want to be an idea person. And you say to do that, and then you decide on a strategy to do it. And then you find out you're either wrong, or you're right or half wrong and half right. And most of the time, the best you can do is half right.

Julia: Well, thanks everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode.