Savory Times

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Shared on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 10:53

I hate my job.

In theory, it's a cool gig. For the past seven years I've been the head of this small company promoting tourism in a suburb of Chicago. Prior to that I worked for 12 years in the city doing similar work. It was a big thing for me to get this gig and move from being a small fish in a big pond to the big tuna in the small pond. Every step in the ladder I've taken in my career has been beneficial and in a way made me understand so much more what my superiors go through. Every boss can be an idiot, or don't know what their doing or not have balls. Until you become that boss you really don't have a full understanding. So it was with great joy I took this gig as I would be a CEO now, surely this would let me enjoy some of those CEO perks I've seen right? Sadly, I've never golfed or traveled less as I have as a CEO. When I was a mere Director, my expense account was larger, my travel was broader, ticket's to games, plays and concerts were ever flowing. None of that shit happens now as my budget is much smaller than I enjoyed in Chicago and I'm in charge of it in totality. When my pc breaks down, there's no IT department to come fix it, there's no marketing department to write my grants.....and then there's the politics. I have more holes in my back than a slice of swiss cheese. People will smile in your face while twisting their blade deep into your spine. I've never weighed more, had more grey hair or more debt than I have since I've been out here.

So, when I get successes I relish them. Because I have to put up with so much bullshit, it seems like sweet smells are few and far between. I hit a major home run last week when I unveiled phase 1 of my rebranding campaign for tourism. I started this journey almost two years ago and now it's finally coming to fruition. In 2007 the Village funded a crappy study on Heritage Tourism which, I argued against. You'll just be giving someone $45,000 to tell you things you already know. Sure enough, the report came out and wow a further waste of money I could not see, however there was one glimmering shard; a recommendation for a branding study. Based off my recommendation, this was put in the study and highlighted as a need to do item. I had been wanting to do this for years, yet people's willingness to spend $75 - $100,000 on research is usually pretty low. I smelled blood and based off "their" study I wrote and received a grant from the State of Illinois for this and budgeted it to begin in 2009. Then the economy hit the crapper. I lost almost $200,000 of my budget and the Village was threatening more cuts. Sadly, I had to cut this project to revise my budget in line with what the Village had called for and I unhappily trudged into Village Hall on a cold December evening to present my changes. On the table was another $100,000 cut to my budget so I was hoping for a little something back, $10,000, $20,000 be merciful. Talk centered around this study quite unknowingly and for the next hour I found myself convincing the Village board to give me back $62,000 to conduct this study. Now, I would have rather taken the money and shored up things that were battered with all the cuts but I got the money so move forward I did. And not without criticism. A few trustees and a couple of my own board members questioned the logic of doing a study like this in these times stating we should be spending the money on marketing. I held firm, there is no better time to take the pulse of our consumers (visitors) and realign our marketing to better suit them. Holding firm I launched this study in January and for the past six months research has been conducted on visitors, residents, stakeholders, internet....there was a ton of research and I was quite confident that at the end of this project, even if people didn't like it they could not argue with it due to the vastness of research that went into it. I had to put up with one more round of criticism last month as I reached out to the public to gain their opinions only to have snide comments made online about how wasteful this was, how I should lose my job, how I should have had a high school student do this for a project. And through this all I cannot respond, it's not professional. I have to take these insults and misconceptions without being able to say "hey asshole, you don't know what you're talking about you have no idea of the depth of this project so perhaps you should research things more before you spout off your mouth" No, I have to sit here and take it, so it was with great anxiety last week when I flew out my consultant and we presented the results of the first part of the study; the research. After an hour meeting, I haven't seen so many smiles. People gave glowing comments about it, calling it brilliant and exciting and thanking me and the Bureau for doing it. Yet, there was one person not smiling. The Village President. Oh shit....."David, what did you think?" I asked, and as he looked at me he began to spout off a list of ideas coming from his head. He loved it, in fact he took me out for sushi right then to discuss it more and the applications that would stem from it. I had endured, I had won. But it's not quite over yet as now we have to do the creative part, the look; the actual fun part. Then we have to apply it. There's much work to be done, but for now I'm taking time to savor this feeling of satisfaction of a job well done. And being out here in hell, that feeling is few and far between.

Oh, let me share our "Brand Platform" From this, we will develop the creative and brand strategy

Target Audience : For Intellectually Curious People

Frame-of-Reference: O P is a diverse community on the western edge of Chi

Point of Difference: Where you can walk a path of discovery

Benefit: and find inspiration in the footsteps of genius.

 

Comments

Claude505's picture
Submitted by Claude505 on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 09:37
Good for you! Way to hang in there!

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