Friday, July 3, 2009

Kudos

On Wednesday I gave a presentation to some important people at work.  If you've heard me talk about this already, scroll down to the bottom...there's more.

  • The CEO (Tim)
  • The VP (Jason)
  • My Boss
  • The Co-Director of IT
  • The Acting Marketing Director
  • The CEO's daughter
  • The CEO's assistant
  • and 2 people I work with - Sara (the copy writer) and Jenn (the graphic designer)

The last 2 were my support group...and i had shown it to my boss also, so she jumped in to clarify on my behalf a few times.  But largely, I was on my own.  My powerpoint didn't work because it was Office 07 and the conference room hasn't been upgraded yet, so I had to run back downstairs to my desk and save it back to 03 format.  By the time I arrived back up at the conference room, everyone was there and it was a few minutes past the start time for the meeting.  Everyone around the table was just chatting and I was standing up front, so I called the meeting to order.  Intimidating?  Yes.  Very much so.  Oh, and the CEO was in the front seat, so I was literally standing over top of him looking down.

I was rough when I started and out of breath from running downstairs and back up, but I went through things to consider while looking at the website design, including the potential audience and where the company could grow outside of our "insurance bubble". I keyed in on buzzwords that I heard Tim ( the CEO) mention at a sales meeting last week. When I showed the new design, I left everyone in the room speechless. After they saw the new design there was silence for about 30 seconds before Jason (the VP, who doubted hiring me because I didn't know the insurance business) finally asked "how long have you worked here". Me: less than 3 weeks. Jason: "You'd never know. You get it."  Or something to that effect. They are trying to grow Ash beyond just insurance agents to be able to expand cliental, and that was exactly what my proposal was about. Basically, I tied together all their company visions that they have brainstormed over the past year into a new web design without knowing it. They couldn't find a single thing to change about my design and concept for reorganization.

I thought I did a good job.  Every Friday morning, we have an all-company meeting where the CEO speaks and gives inspirational words.  It's always video taped for internal use.  I happen to edit the video, so I took a clip from it.  Check it out below:


2 comments:

  1. Wow Ryan that is so cool! Congratulations! I'm really proud of you! That is a huge compliment to be hearing those things from the CEO! Way to go!!

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