Many of my jobs that I have worked at in my tenure have been filled with women. So to my knowledge that hasn’t been the biggest challenge I’ve faced. I have also been at places that were engrained in agriculture so that was never a stumbling block for me either. The thing that has caught me up different times in my career is not asking enough questions and assuming.
I can clearly remember this one time I was working at a marketing agency on a dairy client and helping to put together my first advertising plan for them. (For those that don’t know it’s when an agency or marketing partner of the client puts together a recommendation of where that company should place ads throughout the year based on different goals and target audiences.)
Well I got instructed by my colleague of what was needed, what the timeline was and cleared with her the next steps in the project. I thought I was golden. Okay, maybe not so much. You see I had never read a media kit before (aka where all the prices and advertising availabilities live) and so I thought an inside front cover was price X.
I had no questions. In fact, it all seemed straight forward and simple. So we were presenting it to the client and that’s when my team member finally realized the mistake. There we were in a client presentation with a set budget and figured out that the inside front cover wasn’t price X it was price X plus the size of a full page ad which was $8,000.
Yep. There I was trying to figure out how we were going to fix an $8,000 mistake. The short version to this story is we did get it figured out as a team – yes the entire team had to help fix my mistake. It was a painful one, but it’s one I have never forgotten and honestly, I’ve learned a lot from.
I’ve learned how to read a media kit 😉 I’ve also learned that a great team will rally behind you and help you solve the problem instead of pointing the finger and throwing you under the bus. Either way, we are all human. We all make mistakes and the point is to learn from them for next time.
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