A Day In The Life Of Cory Huff: Head Of Marketing

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Cory: Hey everybody. Good morning. My name is Cory Huff, and I am the head of marketing at a company called Productive Flourishing. Also, because I know a bunch of people are going to ask, I work from home. Productive Flourishing as an all remote company, has been from the beginning. I live in Portland, Oregon, and we have employees in six different states.

So, we are lucky that we work for an organization that allows us the flexibility and freedom to work from wherever. I know that's becoming more and more common, but I've been doing that for about nine years. I've been working remotely. I'm gonna walk you through my day. Hopefully some of you will find this interesting!

This is my calendar, but you'll see for the beginning of my day today here in about 15 minutes, I'm going to be onboarding a new employee and then I've got a quick check-in with my doctor. It looks like I have a meeting that was moved from, later in the day to nine 30. So I've got a conflict I need to resolve, but this is an important meeting.

So I'm going to go to the. And we'll just move this. This is another project, and I will just move this. Oh goodness. Later today, sometime. And for those who want to see it, this is my home office. And then this is my desk. You can see I've got a ton of stuff on my desk. I am not a terribly organized person.

I'm very cluttered, but my desk has all the things I need on it. You can see my laptop, my external monitor. A couple of external hard drives for something else that I'm working on, a switch over there for breaks and, some donut holes, and my ADHD medication, and some tissues, and some business cards.

And deodorant. A bunch of other random crap. So I know that one of the things that we were talking about in this day in the life of is about wellness and,I have ADHD and I take Adderall by prescription. It's a relatively low dose, and I just started taking it this year.

And it's been a really, really fascinating journey to see my performance. Before learning about ADHD and after. And I'm really grateful that I work in a place where they are open. Our company has, does a great job of putting people in roles where their, their core strengths can be taken advantage of and their weaknesses can be minimized or taken over by other people on the team.

And productive. Flourishing is a run by Charlie who is a, um, former army logistics officer. So he's like a logistics and operations genius. And, he's hired a bunch of people who are also very, very good at project management and logistics. And that is not my area of core strength. I think there are some marketers out there who are very good at all of the moving pieces and all the coordination, and, you know, bless those marketers.

And I am somebody who leans much more on the creative side. I can come up with, you know, five crazy ideas for whatever thing is trying, we're trying to do. So it's, it's really important, I think for marketers to find a team where the things you are good at are needed by the team that you're working on.

So I'm really glad that I have. I'm lucky that I'm in a place where I can openly talk about ADHD and some of the challenges I have, not everybody is safe. Not every team member feels like they can talk to their boss about it, or even be open about it with their coworkers. I don't have guidance on when you shouldn't disclose or anything like that.

But I think if you feel safe with your boss, being able to talk to them even just one-on-one and say, you know, I have these challenges and rather than saying, I have ADHD and expecting them to know what that means. It's more about, I'm good at this thing, and I'm not good at this. So how can we make my job more about the things that I'm good at?

I'm less about the things that I'm not good at and that's what I would encourage people to do with their, their marketing careers. All right. So I'm just gonna draft from blank here and say,

Product Flourishing is launching a crowdfunding campaign. If you've been a reader or a planner customer for more than a few months, you know we're working on launching a digital version of Momentum Planner.

So random part of my day. About a few weeks ago, I helped an accompany who needed help figuring out how to hire some marketers. I helped them figure out like how to write their job descriptions and how to work with marketers to make things more effective. So they sent me some packages and I thought this would be fun to see.

This is just another random part of my day. This kind of stuff happens all the time, where I'll help people and they send me stuff. That's one of the fun parts of working in marketing. Okay. It is 11:06 and, I have been on calls all morning, but it's been a really good, really productive call. Quick check in with my doctor about my ADHD medication.

My weight's down, my blood pressure is. So we're playing around with my ADHD medication to fine tune that. And then had a great long call with our dev team that is building the momentum app. The personal planner app that we're building that comes out in Q2 of 2020. And we got to see a demo.

We got to see the first look at the weekly view of the planner. So you can see all your projects together in one place and how they all relate to each other. Super excited about it. We also got into like the backend piece on how we're going to do transactional emails, for all you marketing ops nerds out there, we had a transactional email conversation. We even got into some O Ops. Uh, around registration flows. And then I just had a great conversation with one of my contractors who is doing influencer outreach for us. We've identified a handful of specific YouTube channels that we want to work with, so that we can send them some planner bundles to give away to their audience.

And I get them on Instagram live to talk about their creative process, so that we can grow our audiences together. Okay. Now I've checked emails and slack and stuff,before my lunch break. So I'm going to go take a good 40 minute lunch. That usually involves me eating some leftovers because I look cooking at home and then maybe taking a short walk around the block or, chilling on the couch and playing Switch for a little bit.

So I am microwaving some leftover, lamb and lentil stew that I made for last Fridays. We'll have time premiere. We had a big party, had a bunch of people over to watch the premiere of the Wheel Of Time. It was super fun. It is now 3:30 and I had an hour with my content marketing specialist to talk about a big blog post that we're going to be publishing in December, as well as a sales page that she's writing for us.

And also another big blog post that will be published next week. So it was a long, I involved detailed discussion talking about SEO, talking about, you know, the right title for SEO versus the right title for general readability and how we balance the two. Sothese are very common discussions that I have with my team on the regular.

And because I work from home,I am now going to do laundry. I'm just gonna go throw a little laundry in, and then I'm going to come back and finish a couple of things up. And then I'm going to talk with the founder at the end of the day, because we have some priority conflict around some content pieces that are coming out, but I need him to resolve.

So, that is where I'm at right now. I know there's our laundry for the day or for the week rather. So my wife sorts the laundry and my job is to take it downstairs to the coin-op machines in our basement and wash these down there.

All right. It is evening and I'm wrapping up my day. As I mentioned earlier, I spoke to our founder about some content questions, and the blog posting question turned into two blog posts – one of which will be significantly longer, and it's gonna take us a little while longer to write, but the shorter one I'm excited about. After the blog post conversation, I wrapped up some emails and made dinner for me and my wife.

We had fried eggs and bacon for dinner, just simple and easy for the night. And then I worked on a side project this evening. Overall it was a pretty good day. There was a lot of work today. This is a typical Tuesday for me. But now that I am done working on work stuff and side project stuff, I am getting ready for bed and I will watch a sitcom probably Schitt's Creek before I go to sleep and maybe play on my switch a little bit.

So good night everybody. I hope this was an interesting or insightful day look into the day of a Marketer. Have a great day!