Shawn Franklin

Owning a Business

Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.

Work Experience

January 2007 – Present

I now work for Digital Realty Trust – http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com – as the Marketing Information Systems Manager. We lease out datacenter space to companies like Facebook, Yahoo, UBS Financial, BP, MySpace, etc.

There are four of us in the Marketing department and my role includes:

• Project Manager – every month this year we have a marketing campaign consisting of print ads, banner ads, direct mail, a microsite and email and I am responsible for making sure everything gets done (working with the creative agencies and getting the necessary approvals internally as well as ensuring that all Leads are getting to sales people ASAP)
• Market Research – we have an online survey that we invite our contacts in our marketing database to answer. I work with the market research agency for the online survey, I conduct the email invitation broadcasts, then I assemble all of the results, analyze and then the results end up in a white paper that we send back out to our marketing database and conduct a webinar
• Webmaster – managing and maintaining the coporate website including a 12-month search engine optimization project that started in January
• Salesforce.com admin – we have more than 80 employees using Salesforce in many different departments, which involves a lot of reporting to Senior Management
• Vtrenz admin – this is the tool we use to manage our opt-in marketing database and broadcast our email invitations regarding our events and webinars
• Webinar host/moderator – I run all of our online webinars; both promotion and production

May 2004 – December 2007

I started my career working at Starr Tincup. What an experience it was! I was there 3 1/2 years and, at the end of my time there, realized that I was way out of my league. The people there at Starr Tincup set an entirely different bar for hard work and intelligence. I am glad that I was part of it and got to help build parts of the company. However, it was definitely disengaging and deflating to come this self-realization, but I knew because of my own personal limitations that I would never become Partner in the firm and, therefore, agreed that it was my time to move on. For my first job, I couldn’t have had a better opportunity and I still thank the Principals for affording me the chance to work there.

Here is a bullet-point highlight of my tenure at Starr Tincup:

• I was hired as a ‘Rover’ to go around and be a helpful hand to all of our ‘Delivery’ teams
• Three (3) months after graduating college I was promoted by the owners to be the VP of Marketing
• I ended up writing the best marketing plan I had ever seen (subsequently, the plan was never funded)
• I did, however, have a team of people under me for that year to manage
• Quickly after that I was given the highly-coveted ‘Rover’ position for a while. Meaning, I had skills enough in most areas of marketing that I could help any of the project managers get things done for our clients
• Then I fell into data management where I became our firms expert in a few sales and marketing software applications (namely, Eloqua, Salesforce.com and Salesnet)
• Then I was pulled into an actual account manager position where I was in charge of client projects and delivering our service
• I had a team of people under me to deliver on client projects that I had to motivate, manage and herd towards success
• I was an account manager from that point on (~2 years total)
• I worked as part of a team on our business development strategy. As a result of that project, you now see some of the companies listed on the Starr Tincup Partners page
• I was a mentor to several people in the company during my tenure (e.g. staff, interns, peers) formally and informally and had some success making them productive, value-adding employees
• I had input into how project management plays a part into the way we deliver our service. See my resume entry on Project Management
• I was a part of several Salesforce.com implementations and roll outs. See my resume entry on Salesforce.com

There were two significant layoffs in my tenure at Starr Tincup and for some reason I seem to have found a way to survive both. There are millions of people smarter than I, but I seem to have been doing the right kind of work in our worst kind of times as a business and, thus, made it through the layoffs.

Ideas

I put a lot of effort into my ideas. Most people call me one of the more reflective people they have ever known and that comes out in my ideas and recommendations that I put forth.

People

I like people that are diligent; that are smart enough to challenge an idea on the fly; that have the critical thinking skills to understand the ‘why’ in a business strategy.