Bilbo Baggins had a team of 13 consultants, Jesus had 12 interns, and the Spartan General Leonidas had a staff of 300. While there is strength in numbers, there is agility, efficiency, and resourcefulness in smaller teams. Your potential project team includes two adventure-ready helpers:
Daisy Quaker
SEO strategist and creative
I leverage SEO Strategy + Content + Customer Focus to build a competitive gameplan and create enticing content for bots and humans.
A snapshot of me:
- A decade of digital marketing experience ranging from execution roles to leadership roles.
- In-depth knowledge and hands-on experience pitching, building, and executing customer acquisition campaigns.
- Expertise in search engine optimization, conversion optimization, lead acquisition campaigns, email marketing, and marketing automation.
- My unique ability lies in gathering insights and solving challenges with little to no oversight. I’ve managed million-dollar digital marketing budgets and driven double-digit revenue and traffic growth by working with a strategy-first approach. I seek to understand, evaluate, and gather information before I recommend any tactics.
Working with Daisy
On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I’m a Campaigner (ENFP — Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Prospecting). Here are some of my strengths and weaknesses based on feedback from colleagues and clients.
Daisy’s Strengths
- Observant, thoughtful, and creative: I see the big picture very clearly, I love aligning strategy to overarching goals, and I love thinking of creative ways to help clients achieve their goals.
- Curious: I’m always looking to learn, challenge my own assumptions, and grow. I’m an open-minded and imaginative person, that loves to dive in and extract insights to solve challenges. I love going all Sherlock Holmes in your keywords, analytics, and search console reports to find opportunities. I love reviewing customer research data to find clues to what people are looking for.
- Natural empath: My desire to know and understand your business goals and your target audience stems from strong empathetic skills. I want to understand your goals and needs before I build a strategy. I love creating a strategy that helps answer human pain points, objections, and desires (and gets love from Google).
- Honest and upfront: I’m a straight-shooter, I give honest feedback. I believe thoughtful feedback and critiques is one of the kindest things you can do for others because it allows room for growth.
- Strong communicator: From a young age I’ve always loved writing, I’m comfortable presenting (I’ve even dabbled as a very amateur stand-up comedian) and I love listening (see: curiosity).
- Good enough: I’m not a perfectionist, I believe done is better than perfect. Progress is iterative. But I also love working with people that will collaborate or review my work (my right-hand is Josie).
Daisy’s Weaknesses
- Administrative: Routine tasks drain me, so I do my best to navigate around and avoid these types of projects. If you are looking for someone to take instructions and just execute, I’m not the right fit.
- Focus: I used to joke that I have monkey-brain. I can find my mind drifting from one thing to another. When brainstorming or coming up with solutions, my monkey brain is my biggest asset. I have an uncanny ability to find insights, pose counter solutions to challenges, and share ideas that others haven’t thought of yet. That said, focusing for long periods on a task is something I have to work at. I meditate every day (as it’s been shown to improve this skill) and I put away my phone/email/Slack to get work done. These systems help me minimize distractions. This also means I’m slower to respond to email, and I don’t check my social media accounts too often.
- Independent: I love being a freelancer because it allows me to set my own schedule and pace. At my core, I’m a free spirit, and what that means is this: I work well with folks who don’t need constant/daily access to my attention. I love working with clients that have a challenge, set expectations, communicate limitations, and step back to let me do my work. I’m more creative and strategic when I have breathing room. All my projects include periodic check-ins and reporting to ensure we are in alignment with your goals.
Josie Strom
Communications consultant and self-described diehard “words person” — don’t ask her to do math.
- Josie’s clients have included the U.S. State Department, Reuters News Agency, and the Minnesota Committee on Foreign Relations.
- For three years she oversaw the Runway Manhattan channel on Reuters and her work appeared regularly in various publications around the globe such as the British Herald and The Guardian.
- Josie specializes in providing critical feedback on all sorts of content, whether websites, blog posts, newsletters, video scripts, presentations, or press releases.
- She has a passion for polishing stellar content to ensure maximum clarity, consistency, and impact.
Working with Josie
On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Josie’s a Logician (INTP — Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Prospecting). Here’s her take on the personality writeup:
Josie’s Strengths
- Authentic: What you see is what you get. A stereotypical Sagittarius, I prize honesty and sincerity above most traits. This comes in handy as an editor, since I spend most of my time playing know-it-all and telling people what I think is wrong and what could be better. But I also go out of my way to highlight what’s right and point out what’s already great. As someone who admittedly doesn’t take criticism very well, I have the highest respect for people who do, and I have a keen appreciation for the line that divides constructive and unconstructive feedback.
- Focused: A perfect day for me includes at least a few hours where I barricade myself in utter isolation and laser in on a project without moving an inch until it’s done. Where Daisy is the big picture thinker, my attention is on the small details. My approach is very much “inch wide, mile deep” as opposed to “mile wide, inch deep” mode. When I’m wild about a certain topic I will devour everything I can read about it until I reach walking encyclopedia status. On how many subjects have I attained this level of expert knowledge? Four. Don’t expect answers on anything else. You’ll just get a blank stare.
- Lighthearted: I think laughter is one of the things that really make life worth living. I love to laugh and I enjoy working with people who can make me absolutely bust a gut (Daisy is one). “Disarm with humor” is probably the best piece of advice I have ever heard.
Josie’s Weaknesses
- Unauthentic: Yes, I know, my first “strength” was supposed to be “authentic.” (See: conflicted, below.) The trouble is, working in content creation has made it clear to me that I’m pretty unoriginal and generally uninspired. Ideation is not my thing. I try to compensate for this by being really super at the execution step: I love appreciating brilliant ideas, shaping them, and conveying them — more Dr. Watson than Sherlock Holmes. (Which goes far to explain why I am a huge fan of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon — that’s one of those four areas of expertise I bragged about, earlier.)
- Hyper detail oriented: Daisy referenced the old “done is better than perfect” adage. I always mix this axiom up and say it wrong: “perfect is better than done.” I think I unconsciously screw it up on purpose. Attention to detail is a great skill for an editor but it can be taken to extremes. I tend to get caught up in the minutiae and lose sight of the forest for the trees… or is it “lose sight of the trees for the forest?”
- Conflicted: For me, a fair amount of indecisiveness goes hand-in-hand with a good dose of endless, unremitting, ceaseless self-questioning and doubt — if not an all-out contrarian streak. It’s great to be open-minded, but I’m the type who could agonize for hours, deliberating over whether the comma should go here or there. Just have to shut that down at some point. To quote Daisy, “Efficiency, people!”