The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.
I entered college as a journalism major and upgrayedded that to broadcasting. My Junior year I learned just how many other people in the world thought they would be the next Howard Stern so I started taking as many Marketing classes as possible. I graduated and continued taking Marketing at a local Jr. College while looking for a job.
My first job was rubbish. Helping turn printed books into online materials in the late 90s. From there I got my first Marketing job where I shot training videos for a new defunct tool company. It was tediously boring and I started to hate video production. From there I got more into graphic design working for a power supply company and having a boss who absolutely hated me. That lasted all of a year. In 2001 I was laid off.
Bad time to be out of a job. It took my a long time before I got another job, which lasted 3 months and then another lay off. From there I quickly found another job where I stayed for a couple of years. I had a manager who convinced me to get my MBA so I did. I found out there was a side-tract I could take in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence. By this point I was doing a bit of web development, specifically hand-writing a CRM.
My manager helped me realize my current job was a dead-end and then I found a new job at a great company where I was a Marketing Analyst. I rose to the top of the group and, as we switched CRMs to MS Dynamics, I took the lead in re-writing all of our reports in SQL. I initiated a data warehousing / BI project that was very successful until IT took it over and killed it dead with bad ideas. By this point I was onto a new project - nurture marketing.
I hand-wrote a Nurture Program using SQL, Access and Lyris for email. It was successful but became extremely intricate so we moved into using a professional tool - Neolane (now Adobe Campaign). Seven years after joining the company they announced they were moving out of state so I found my current employer who uses Marketo.
And that's how I went from a young man in Belgium to a Marketing Automation Manager with a doctorate in Evil.
Robb Barrett
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