Diana Alt [00:00:04]:
Hey, Diana Auld here. And this is Work Should Feel Good, the podcast where your career growth meets your real life. Each week I share stories, strategies and mindset shifts to help you build a work life that works for you on your terms. Good morning everyone and welcome to Work Should Feel Good, the show where your career growth meets your real life. I'm your host, Diana Alt and today my friend Joey Centered and I are going to discuss what happens when you stop trying to cast a wide net in your career and job search and instead start being brave enough to specialize. Joey is a self proclaimed strategic combo platter who has blended marketing training and design experience to help businesses ranging in size from small little businesses up to Fortune 100 Enterprises. He's made a name for himself by adapting to reality, embracing hard truths and pushing through politics to get things done. Welcome to the show, Mr.

Diana Alt [00:01:06]:
Senart. How are you today?

Joey Senart [00:01:07]:
I hope you said my name right. Thank you for saying my last name right.

Diana Alt [00:01:10]:
How is that hard to say?

Joey Senart [00:01:12]:
Senart. Snart.

Diana Alt [00:01:14]:
Oh, Snart. You're gonna be Snart from now on.

Joey Senart [00:01:18]:
There was a time where I calculated 36 different ways that people were pronouncing.

Diana Alt [00:01:22]:
My name and I'm like, Hooked on.

Joey Senart [00:01:25]:
Phonics is the most common, followed by Senate, which I don't know, they just don't look at the letters.

Diana Alt [00:01:32]:
I could see that. I get Diana, Deanna, Diane, Deanne, Dana, like all the things I got Dorothy once I'm like, how did you get to Dorothy? I try really hard to get people's names right. So I want to start off in an area you might not be expecting me to go. And that is how leading things in gaming has helped your career or kind of just complemented your career maybe as a way to think about it how.

Joey Senart [00:02:06]:
Leading things in gaming.

Diana Alt [00:02:07]:
Yeah. Because you used to. You kind of led a community around a game whose name I cannot remember. But I remember you being very active in that.

Joey Senart [00:02:15]:
Ah, the flesh of the flesh and blood card game.

Diana Alt [00:02:17]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:02:20]:
Led towards career stuff. Wow. All right. It's funny cause I remember there was, I Remember seeing on LinkedIn, this was a couple years ago of like CEOs were talking about how much value came from being a like a clan leader in World of Warcraft.

Diana Alt [00:02:35]:
Oh, right.

Joey Senart [00:02:38]:
It was honestly kind of inspiring for me. Not that I was like, oh well, I'm going to go run a community for a game and I'll be a CEO someday. You can tell by how I talk. I will never be a CEO company. But no, I think when it comes to that. So, so for everybody, just quick context. I'm a nerd and I was a part of a. I helped build a community for a card game called Flesh and Blood.

Joey Senart [00:03:03]:
Building a community here means going to local, like game stores, local, you know, local game shops, coffee shops, finding opportunities to like, host events, pull events, doing learn to play events. So that way new gamers can explore the game and decide if they want to keep coming back for these things. Working with stores on like organized play schedules. So like this store is going to go on Monday nights, this store is going to go on Wednesday. All of these things I can say is because I just wanted to play a game with a bunch of people. But those skills are project management, event management, a lot of communication with professionals, a lot of learning the ins and outs of a different industry, just so I know how to talk to them, to be like, hey, can you order this game? Can you? So there's all that and then there's all of the community management that comes with it as well. I'm also, I do, I've done marketing and training. So it's educating new people, it's educating people who want to run those events.

Joey Senart [00:04:06]:
There's a lot of these little extra skills that come when you're a nerd you don't realize you're doing. I was talking with somebody last night about how we don't translate the work that we do into things that are more attractive for bigger, bigger efforts. Yeah, like when I could say, yeah, I went to a game store and I hosted like a Learn to Play and I showed a bunch of people how to play a game. That's event coordination, that's project management, that's training and development. That's all of these things that translate nicely in a resume.

Diana Alt [00:04:38]:
Well, and it also is marketing too. I love that kind of stuff because a lot of the people that I work with are in tech and especially for software engineers. For a long time there's been a lot of people, especially very old school engineering managers that would ask anybody that was a candidate for an engineering role what do they code in their off time? Which I don't love that because I think people should be able to do other things other than their primary work. But I also understand sentiment that if you show me that you're interested in learning outside your eight to five time frame, that is a good thing, especially in tech fields where it's hard to keep up.

Joey Senart [00:05:21]:
So maybe honestly, like, we will do a sequel podcast called Not Working should also feel good.

Diana Alt [00:05:31]:
I'm Gonna write that down. Not working should also feel good. That's a really excellent point, Joey, because a lot of times people, look, I talk a lot about the reasons that work makes life not feel good and a lot of times it's that there's no time for life left. But the mental strain or the pressure to constantly keep up outside the office can really be onerous. I think people should be willing to do it.

Joey Senart [00:06:05]:
But there's that whole adage, right, of if you like your job, then it does. It shouldn't feel like you're at work or whatever it is, however, in the world that goes. I think it really only applies to if you like what you do. Doing it in the off hours doesn't feel like work.

Diana Alt [00:06:21]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:06:22]:
Like I loved doing the project management, the events. I loved building that flesh and blood community. I loved like designing like cool little things and little stories and when I did some content creation, I love doing that stuff. I could say that is me polishing my skills and embracing a passion and educating myself and practicing for the purposes of getting a better job. But I was just having so much fun with it. It didn't feel like that's what I was doing.

Diana Alt [00:06:47]:
I, I love that. And I, I, I actually have had trouble maintaining the right work life balance because of stuff like that. Because when I was in corporate I worked, you know, I was in product management for 17 years towards the end of my career and I was a scrum master for a while too. I did all the things in, in software development and when I started coaching, I was coaching and doing different sorts of, you know, side hustle training and things like that. It felt like I was working seven days a week on one hand if I looked at the calendar. But I was having fun with that side stuff. Going into working for myself full time. It was very hard to break working seven days a week.

Diana Alt [00:07:35]:
Like, oh, I don't have to do that because I don't have to work coaching around a full time job anymore. Coaching and running a coaching business is so.

Joey Senart [00:07:44]:
Yeah, I mean I think for something like that to roll it into the topic that we're going to go on is if I'm working towards some sort of feeling of accomplishment, then cool. If I'm just training for the safe. And this is may, this is maybe just a me thing. If I'm training for the sake of training, it feels more like an obligation, less like a hobby, less like a passion.

Diana Alt [00:08:01]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:08:01]:
And at that point it's just a gamble that it's going to mean something down the road. So, like, for me, again, to kind of bring to the topic of this, I spent time in my off hours learning the daylights out of a technology which was braze so I can get certifications. And I did that on my off. I did that on my off tower time because I knew that was going to help me get. I knew it was going to look really good. But I also had that accomplishment of I got certified and that felt good. And that's all that it led to. I do not care at all that I know Bray's better.

Joey Senart [00:08:33]:
I don't care. And somebody who's worked in training for 10 years, nobody cares that they know something better. Nobody's ever cared that they know something better. They point to a milestone, they lean in on something that they can show. Very specific, very tangible, very. Not philosophical.

Diana Alt [00:08:53]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:08:53]:
And for me, that's. If I'm gonna do any of this, like, off hours, passion project kind of stuff, that's where it has to lead to.

Diana Alt [00:09:00]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:09:01]:
I ran a successful event. Eight people showed up. I put out a video that people really enjoyed. I did this. I like, I gotta do some of this. For me, that isn't just the gamble of maybe it'll pay off later. Oh, you're just gonna burn yourself out.

Diana Alt [00:09:15]:
I get so. I get very salty about addiction to certifications.

Joey Senart [00:09:24]:
What?

Diana Alt [00:09:25]:
The addiction to certifications.

Joey Senart [00:09:28]:
Oh, yeah.

Diana Alt [00:09:28]:
We'll have. In tech, product marketing, anybody in academia, they're all chasing like, these antlers, like whatever the heck they are. And every industry is different. But the spaces that I've worked in personally and the spaces that most of my clients work, the certification is maybe the thing. If there's, you know, if there's 20 qualified people and I have to narrow it down to 10 for the first round of interviews, like, maybe that'll help. But it's not going to overtake the fact that somebody that's uncertified has impressive results to share on their resume. And the farther along you go in hiring like it's, what can you do with it? Is more important than Certs.

Joey Senart [00:10:15]:
That's gonna be one of those. Like, I. I don't know if I've shared the same experience, because the whole point of my. My experience was I had the impressive results.

Diana Alt [00:10:24]:
I ha.

Joey Senart [00:10:25]:
I have an impressive resume I'm very proud of. I've gotten to work for ebay. I've gotten. I've had PayPal as a client, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines. I had all these big things along with 15 years of experience. And I put that out into the world when I was trying to get a job, you know, 20, 23, 20, 22, 20, 20, like the last couple of years and I couldn't get in the door at all. So for me, all of that stuff that you were just talking about, it was great. After I got in the door, it was phenomenal.

Joey Senart [00:10:55]:
Like, if I was. If I got to be a part of that 20, everyone else is in trouble. But getting to be a part of that 20, that's where the certification really helped me.

Diana Alt [00:11:05]:
Okay, so different industries are different ways too. So I'm talking about, like what I have experienced, especially with some of the things that are not technical certifications. A PMP is one that comes up.

Joey Senart [00:11:18]:
All the time for sure.

Diana Alt [00:11:19]:
Do you need a pmp? Well, literally in the government, you might. In sub. If you're trying to get on at a government contractor, you might literally. Nobody runs a project like the PMP tells you to run a project.

Joey Senart [00:11:33]:
So it's like Agile. Nobody runs agile properly.

Diana Alt [00:11:37]:
No. Yeah. Having spent many years in it. No. Okay.

Joey Senart [00:11:42]:
You're an agile company and then you ask about story points. They're like, what's that? Like, you really didn't do agile, did you?

Diana Alt [00:11:49]:
Depends on what framework you're talking about. Like, I could talk about that all day.

Joey Senart [00:11:53]:
Semantics, Diana.

Diana Alt [00:11:55]:
Well, it comes.

Joey Senart [00:11:55]:
Are we doing DevOps? Are we doing. There's a whole bunch of whatever, a whole bunch of shenanigans with agile. I've never seen it done before.

Diana Alt [00:12:03]:
That's a rabbit trail for another day. That might be the app that might be a topic for the After 5 podcast. We were saying that we needed to have with a cocktail or two. So you. Let's go back to. There was a period where I first met you in like a very wild instructional design group on Facebook. That's where you and I ran into each other. And I think we were just both salty in the comments a lot.

Joey Senart [00:12:33]:
And then that is definitely how we connected. It had. It had to have been something snarky. I couldn't tell you what it was. In their place.

Diana Alt [00:12:42]:
It was in that group which I had poked into because I've kind of been. My work has been adjacent tech in L and D, because I worked in ed tech and a few other things and we connected on that. But I remember for you there was a period where you were trying to be a generalist. So let's talk about like when you were. I'll take marketing or I'll take training. How. What kind of phase were you in in your career? How did that work out for you? And why were you pursuing your career in that manner?

Joey Senart [00:13:14]:
All right, so we're going to go through a very quick. How did my career turn into what it was in the first place? Okay, so I started out as a. I'm a retail. Tenure to retail. Tour of duty is usually how I put it. And then after that, I had the opportunity to work for what I call adult retail, which is a call center. It's the same drama and crap, but everyone's older. But that company ended up being Constant Contact, which some of you might be familiar with as a.

Joey Senart [00:13:43]:
It's targeted for small businesses, but they do. They're a marketing platform. Email marketing, primarily. So I did call center work for them. That swings me a little bit into marketing. Now I have a graphic design degree. I don't use it, but with it came a little bit of marketing education. And I did kind of fall in love with that space.

Joey Senart [00:14:03]:
Didn't mean much.

Diana Alt [00:14:05]:
Marketing, huh? What did you fall in love with?

Joey Senart [00:14:08]:
Just, I fell in love with the marketing side. I only got to take, like, one or two truly marketing courses in graphic. It was the Art Institute. So that bar was really low for useful things.

Diana Alt [00:14:19]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:14:19]:
And now they're not a thing anymore because, yeah, I was part of that nightmare anyway. So I ended up doing a call center work for Constant Contact. I didn't really care that it was marketing. I just cared that it wasn't retail. But that did get me into looking a little bit on the marketing side, helping people through their email campaigns, not just how to build them, which was what my real job was, but they also focused a lot on what they called know how, which was us being proactive to callers and saying, hey, we know some best practices that could help you. So while I was doing call center work, I eventually was able to get a job in. I ended up getting a job in training because I got really good at explaining very complicated things in very simple ways. So they said, how would you like to make not enough money and do that full time? And I, being young and dumb, said, I would love to make not enough money and do training full time.

Joey Senart [00:15:04]:
So that got me into training. That is what ultimately got me looking up the chain into kind of more of the corporate side of things. That was my introduction into corporate America. I was very bad at it. I got let go from that job in four months because I did not know how to communicate in that direction. I knew how to communicate to customers and everything's on fire.

Diana Alt [00:15:24]:
Oh, but not internally.

Joey Senart [00:15:26]:
Not internally. The other direction So I really did not know what my lane was, could not stay in it. But I had a friend who moved over to ebay Enterprise, which was the marketing agency arm of ebay at the time. Okay. It was like, hey, you rock the living daylights out of email. And that's all that I care about. Like, you know, systems, you, you can be an awesome support person. So I moved into ebay as a marketing support tech.

Joey Senart [00:15:55]:
And that's where I started working with eBay and PayPal. EBay was my own client also, and PayPal and American Disney and Marvel and all these really cool companies. And I got really comfortable with. I got more comfortable talking to those higher ups, those bigger groups. But that's what really launched me into marketing. From that, I also discovered, hey, I still have a knack for training, because when you're supporting a marketing platform, you have to educate your clients on how to use that platform or you're the one who's getting all that work. You're the one getting support tickets. You're the one working way too much.

Diana Alt [00:16:29]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:16:30]:
So I ended up just instinctively balancing my marketing and training career, moved over into epsilon right afterwards. It was. That was a pure training job for a marketing platform. So I basically shifted right back to where I was, what I was doing in constant contact, doing training for a marketing platform. And then in 2019, this is where we actually get to where we are now. Yeah, 2019, I was about three and a half years in to that job and they got bought and I was told, you have no career growth for two and a half years, like the end. And after three and a half years with not really a lot of career growth, I was like, hey, it's kind of my time. And then they're told, you're waiting for two years.

Joey Senart [00:17:12]:
That sucks. So that's kind of when I was like, all right, well, what, what, what could I do with my career if I just skipped this, Skip this thing. So I went out and I tried a bunch of different stuff. I worked for. I got to work for Salesforce. I worked for a company called Org View, worked for a bunch of little.

Diana Alt [00:17:27]:
Companies doing mostly contract. You were doing contract?

Joey Senart [00:17:31]:
Okay, yeah. Well, it was a blend of contract and some not. But, you know, some things didn't work. I just tried to feel out what my career was going to be. Did I want to do marketing, did I want to do training, did I want to do more creation stuff like what I do now, or did I want to work my way up into like people management and director? I Got opportunities to be managers. People manager. I do. Right now.

Joey Senart [00:17:55]:
I do a lot of like marketing automation manager, which is much more production side.

Diana Alt [00:18:00]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:18:00]:
I spent five years bouncing around to a lot of different places figuring out what do I want, what do I care about what. What do I actually find fulfillment in?

Diana Alt [00:18:09]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:18:09]:
And that's where we got into generalist. I could do marketing. I could do training. I had a ton of experience in both. I had a ton of great clients behind me in both. Both sides of that coin. Like I was doing training for Hot Topic. I was doing training for Walgreens.

Joey Senart [00:18:27]:
I helped Dunkin Donuts build their loyalty program that is still in effect today just as a natural part of my job. So I had some really cool things. So I figured I can go either direction.

Diana Alt [00:18:38]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:18:38]:
Hard. I had two different resumes. I had a marketing resume and a design resume. My LinkedIn, a lot of people that.

Diana Alt [00:18:46]:
Are trying to do that and they're trying to work it on one resume and they are landing nothing in either role. So.

Joey Senart [00:18:52]:
Yeah. So I had those split up. I had different kind of generic cover letters for each. My LinkedIn was still a cluster of madness. And that's kind of what leads to today's point. Our big. Kind of the big revelation with it. And it just got really hard.

Joey Senart [00:19:09]:
Damn near impossible, honestly.

Diana Alt [00:19:11]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:19:12]:
But that's where the term strategic combo platter came in. Which was cute, I think back in a day where Covid wasn't a thing, where remote work wasn't as. Wasn't as common.

Diana Alt [00:19:24]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:19:24]:
But now all it is is that I checked off too many boxes and I look like I was just job hopping. And I'm not passionate about either one.

Diana Alt [00:19:32]:
And what you were doing was career experimentation.

Joey Senart [00:19:36]:
Yeah. And that's usually how I explain it is I wanted to figure out what was important to me. What was most important to me was it culture, was it the type of work, was it security, was it money? And I eventually was able to figure out all of that. Huh.

Diana Alt [00:19:53]:
What? What of those things did you figure out? Because I know you landed on marketing. I know you landed on a braze specialization. But I also know just from chat you and I had over time that wasn't all about that. There was a lot of figuring out what didn't work. There was figuring out what lit you up. Tell us a little bit about some of that.

Joey Senart [00:20:14]:
So I love. I love this one because there's always those questions on what is most important to you. And usually it's a dropdown menu of like it's Job security is it. It's like in. In workday, it's what wakes you up in the morning. And the answer to that is always not having to apply on workday. Yes, but you get options of culture, collaboration, job security, money, benefits, things like that. You get that list.

Joey Senart [00:20:41]:
But there's one option that's not there, and that's what I actually learned is what is important to me, what is trust. Oh, oh, ingrained trust.

Diana Alt [00:20:53]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:20:54]:
You can fake that and pretend it's collaboration. It's not. Same with job security. It's not. I learned over the course of my career that one. I just liked creating things. Like I said, I tried people management and all this stuff. I just liked creating things.

Joey Senart [00:21:07]:
I just want to do. I am very outside of the box. It's just how I think. I think, you know, when you're a trainer for a platform, your job is to know the technology better than anyone is ever going to use it. You need to train them into using it that way. So with that, I got really good at coming up with crafty solutions for things. Being a gamer, you also come up with crafty solutions for things. So it's just ingrained in my being.

Joey Senart [00:21:34]:
But with that, with something like that comes a lot of trust that I can do that stuff. I loved shocking the system. I loved being like, oh, I've got. I loved hearing we've tried this and it didn't work. Oh, give me two weeks. The first week I'm going to fix it, and the second week you're going to wonder how I did it so fast. Loved it. But in order to make that work, trust was vital because it breaks everything else down if you don't have it.

Joey Senart [00:22:03]:
If my bosses didn't trust me, I just got slaughtered. No matter how good the project was, no matter how much I can prove through metrics, and I had some of the worst experiences in my life that I'm still recovering from because there was not that trust. So that is. That is the number one thing. Let me be a badass and then trust me.

Diana Alt [00:22:23]:
Honestly, if. If they added that to the list and workday, they would quickly find out that that becomes one of their top two or three answers. Because a lot of the people I'm working mostly with, people that are high performers mid career, like, usually like mid-30s to late-40s, early-50s, that peak earning, peak growth kind of timeframe, but also during that time frame is the pivot from I'm just chasing, climbing up the ladder or I'm just chasing money into I want to do well on that. But I also want fulfillment, and I would like to watch my kids grow up or.

Joey Senart [00:23:05]:
Yeah. I mean, one of the big things. One of the big things from the instructional designer group when you are and I were in it was teachers moving to instructional designers because Covid knocked so many of them out. Yep. So it's like, how do I do this? And this. This led to the smorgasbord of insanity. That is another. Another podcast.

Diana Alt [00:23:24]:
I feel like that actually would be a fun podcast. There we go.

Joey Senart [00:23:29]:
You'll have to get. You'll have to get Tom McDowell to talk about that one. He's. He can. He could be. He can speak a lot more insight. I will just be cynical and mean. Part of.

Joey Senart [00:23:39]:
Part of what I discovered in the five years of experimenting in marketing training and all that stuff was how much I just did not fit into the learning and development culture.

Diana Alt [00:23:51]:
I have a lot of friends that are in learning and development and talent development. Like, one of the first clients or first guests that I had for the show was in that space. He and I have been friends for five years. I've worked with a lot of clients that are in L and D. But there is definitely some toxicity in there. And I don't see it as much at the leadership levels. Like, a lot of the people I know, a lot of very good directors and whatnot. But I gotta tell you, the number of people that thought I taught third grade so I should be able to walk in and not just how to be an instructional designer, but walk in and manage the team.

Joey Senart [00:24:37]:
Sounds about right.

Diana Alt [00:24:39]:
And I'm like, your ability to follow the Colorado state standards for second grade and developing curriculum is fantastic. I'm glad you have that. That is not the same as figuring out how to. How to develop a whole entire curriculum and design it and build it and what the hell ever tool and manage all the personalities and the C suite that wants to know the ROI because they're threatening to cut the project every three months or whatever. So.

Joey Senart [00:25:10]:
As well as the fact that your team has no clue how to tell how to calculate roi, nobody cares. I will say this to anybody who's looking to L and D and this is dark and I don't care. L and D is easy money. If you have a high tolerance for mediocrity.

Diana Alt [00:25:26]:
Oh, you're.

Joey Senart [00:25:30]:
If you can handle mediocrity, if you can handle doing your job just enough so you can fake it to people who think they're smart about its results and effects and how it impacts the business you're going to be great. You're going to be phenomenal. There's a find a better hobby doing that.

Diana Alt [00:25:48]:
Like, there's a lot of unhappy L and D people doing that. And then, you know, there's mediocrity in every, in every job.

Joey Senart [00:25:54]:
But I think one of the things that I struggle with most with L and D is that results and, and value is completely subjective. And there's not. And this is one of the things I've had every time I've talked about L and D. Specifically, one of the biggest struggles that people have is what exactly does success look like? And then you get into these really generic terms. People are educated, customer satisfaction is up, but you never get into metrics. You never get into feature adoption. You never get into the things of like, change management stuff that that would matter. Onboarding, training.

Joey Senart [00:26:28]:
Well, what is the average lifespan of an employee who has taken my training versus somebody who hasn't?

Diana Alt [00:26:34]:
Yeah, I talk to people about all the time and I'm like, for the people that are in L and D, if they can speak to that, especially if they're trying to be a senior manager, director, vp, like if you are not talking about that on your resume, in interviews, on your LinkedIn, every time you open your mouth, you're not going to be taken seriously by the caliber of organization that you actually want to go to.

Joey Senart [00:26:58]:
Yeah. And the thing is, L and D never got themselves into appreciating the downstream effects of what it is they do. And that is, that is a damn travesty, honestly, the amount of money. So when I was a constant contact, one of the things I learned was training is one of the first departments on the chopping block because it doesn't bring in revenue, however, it preserves it. And that's very difficult to respect when times are tough. Right?

Diana Alt [00:27:28]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:27:29]:
Like we need, we need to fill the coffers and all that we can say is like, we prevent them from depleting.

Diana Alt [00:27:35]:
And, and also people are saying that, but L and D is so often very siloed that don't have the conversations with customer success or account management to prove that out. Like they have a sense from the feedback that they should be, you know, helping increase retention on your SaaS product or whatnot. But there are not the kind of relationships that need to happen between like client success and L and D to actually prove that out.

Joey Senart [00:28:05]:
Yeah. And I think I'm blessed that I was able to start my training career at constant contact because we, we also did in person training, which meant that we had to schedule with support ops to talk about how many people are we taking off the phone at any given time. And then we're also working with those teams of how many tickets have been generated based off of, you know, with like a new release that came out and did we see those reduce or was the time to finish those tickets? Like, was there fewer touches? Were the minutes per call reduced? For people who went through our training, like, we got tangible metrics that I could absolutely react to and then get my mind ingrained in. Ah, this is how this helps the business. Yes. I just don't see any of that.

Diana Alt [00:28:50]:
It happens in some places and it doesn't happen in others. But I want to turn to the world of email marketing now.

Joey Senart [00:28:56]:
Let's get back on. Let's get back on task.

Diana Alt [00:28:58]:
That's fine.

Joey Senart [00:28:59]:
We're good.

Diana Alt [00:29:00]:
I low key. I love, I love email marketing. I'm not the expert that you are, but I, I've enjoyed it for over 10 years. I started off in that space because I went, I somehow wandered over into working for a digital marketing agency as an account manager, which had a lot of product manager, project management to it. And I'm a nerd. I just want to learn what I'm talking about because my clients are going to ask me and it's now one of my favorite parts of my business, which I don't do anything like, you know, Fortune 100 companies are going to do. I do it like Diana does it. But what drew you to email marketing and then what ended up dialing you into Braze? Because you said that that that focus ended up yielding crazy results in your career, which we'll get to in a minute.

Diana Alt [00:29:51]:
But I'm just trying to walk through, like, how did you land on email marketing? How did you land on Braze?

Joey Senart [00:29:57]:
So landing on email marketing specifically was working at Constant Contact. They were an email marketing company. I'd be lying if I said I did my research and then picked that this one was the best. No, I ended up getting really good at email marketing. Just naturally. I also, when I went to school for graph design, I started with multimedia and web. Tried that for two years and learned that people who are looking for multimedia and web would rather have somebody with a graphic design degree. I was like that tracked no business gave two craps about whether or not you can write good code if it still looks like garbage.

Joey Senart [00:30:33]:
Graphic design is. I shifted over graphic design. But I knew HTML. I knew the foundation of email. So it was also easy to just like, well, I know half of how this works, but over time. I started email marketing about 15 years ago.

Diana Alt [00:30:49]:
Okay.

Joey Senart [00:30:49]:
Email marketing has always been a roller coaster, and it has always survived. It is one of the very few marketing mediums that sticks around.

Diana Alt [00:30:58]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:30:58]:
And there's a very fun reason for that. And this is why I've actually kind of fallen in love with it.

Diana Alt [00:31:03]:
Oh, I want to hear your take on this. Because I follow a few people that are in more of the entrepreneurial email marketing space. I'm really. What's your take on that?

Joey Senart [00:31:13]:
Okay. So first off, email marketing has always been a roller coaster. And it's always been a roller coaster anytime some new technology comes along. Social media was supposed to be the end of email marketing. It wasn't. Then you get into, like, your TikTok and your Instagram, like, your. It wasn't like Facebook social feeds. Now it was like videos and viral videos.

Joey Senart [00:31:33]:
And that was supposed to be the end of email marketing, and it wasn't. And then you get into, like, mobile. Mobile devices and all that.

Diana Alt [00:31:42]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:31:43]:
The end of email marketing. And it wasn't. And the reason that it wasn't is a lot less philosophical than you might think, at least in my opinion. But I think I can make a damn good case for it. Of every marketing channel that exists out in the world, email marketing is the only one where customers ask me to talk to them.

Diana Alt [00:32:06]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:32:07]:
That is the only. It is the only channel that I have a personal invitation to. Your curated inbox.

Diana Alt [00:32:15]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:32:16]:
And that is why email keeps winning. That is why email keeps sticking around. Yeah. Now it's not. It will probably not overtake. Like, you're never going to have a viral email unless you do something very wrong, which is not always the best, but it is always going to work in conjunction. So email marketing, when we say this, I'm going to add this, and I will get into how I shift my focus. Email marketing is often also just seen as I send you an email and you see it.

Joey Senart [00:32:45]:
But email marketing is actually. There's an element of it called life cycle, and that is the long game. That is acquiring you and nurturing the relationship and getting you to buy, to convert, whatever that is. Buy something like my page, whatever. Engaging afterwards, Engaging after you've already bought the thing and are not interested in buying again, but staying at the top of your radar.

Diana Alt [00:33:08]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:33:09]:
And then retention. It's this long relationship. Email gets to manage that because it's not. I get to react to exactly what you've done, and I get to do it on my timeline, not yours. I Do it in your email based off of what I've actually seen you do not, gosh, I hope you see me in your newsfeed randomly.

Diana Alt [00:33:28]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:33:28]:
I know where I'm going and that's. I think one of the things that is the most fun about it is building that long relationship and taking those metrics and being like, how do I adjust little things here and there. The other nice part about email is that it's a page of things and I can play with little pieces of it. I can play with little modules. So there's this, there's this big puzzle that you get to put together.

Diana Alt [00:33:52]:
It's interesting because I remember that when I was in the, when I was in the digital marketing agency, my first client was Moen, like the faucets and showers and whatnot people and we had like, honestly it was probably over engineered especially for 2012 when I was working there. But it had highly personalized, highly customized, segmented stuff. But then they didn't email often enough. So you know, what are you going to do? Interesting to learn about the pieces and parts and how they decided the order and what all information they gathered from the clients and their data sources and whatnot. But now I'm on the exact opposite end.

Joey Senart [00:34:33]:
Where email has really gotten to shine is that it's starting to work with those other mediums.

Diana Alt [00:34:38]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:34:38]:
Not competing, which you don't really get to do with those other mediums as well. You're either on Facebook, you're on Instagram or you're on TikTok. And that is, that's the space you have on your phone.

Diana Alt [00:34:48]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:34:48]:
Email is like always there and I can work in conjunction with those. Yeah, like hey, we're going to do a multi channel and omnichannel offer but this is the one you're going to see after you're done wiping through the rest of them.

Diana Alt [00:35:00]:
Well, this is the one that was.

Joey Senart [00:35:02]:
Also a really good.

Diana Alt [00:35:04]:
Email is the one. Or for people that are really into sms. Email and SMS are the ones that every other thing should lead to.

Joey Senart [00:35:12]:
So I'll be a little iffy on SMS just because it's really expensive and there's a lot of weird legality with some of that stuff.

Diana Alt [00:35:18]:
But yeah, maybe, but everybody has a phone so everybody gets text. That's my point.

Joey Senart [00:35:24]:
Everybody.

Diana Alt [00:35:25]:
You got to have an email to sign up for all the phone things. So you know, you could drop your TikTok account but you're not going to drop, you know, you're never going to fully get rid of email in the world that we live in. What led you to Braze? Because you know when you and I chatted about you coming on the show, you said, yeah, I narrowed down from being strategic combo platter. I do training, I do marketing. I hit every industry I can work in, any technology, down into email marketing for Braze. And it made the difference. What made you choose Braze? Yeah, because it was handy or what was it?

Joey Senart [00:36:01]:
No, actually it's because. Partly because it was new, but I also ended up as part of my working, as part of my doing training, as part of my. My contracts world. One of the companies I worked for was Braze. I was their lead platform instructional designer. So I was in charge of actually building the training to get people how to use the platform. I showed up at the wrong time. So my tenure there was short.

Joey Senart [00:36:27]:
They were going to ipo. They did not care about people learning how to use the platform. They just cared about value. So I didn't really belong wrong time. But. But I did recognize that it was a new technology and they were getting a lot of traction on things. So I had a period of unemployment for. Of 10.

Joey Senart [00:36:47]:
I was, I was unemployed for 10 months in 2023.

Diana Alt [00:36:50]:
Unemployed, no contracts or was it partial employment? Like what did it look like?

Joey Senart [00:36:55]:
Friend contracts. I had. I was able to get a couple little projects to pay the bills. But like we had to, we had like I was selling things and like we took a personal to survive and you know, unemployment got like. We did everything we could just to buy time.

Diana Alt [00:37:10]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:37:11]:
I was able to buy time and got out of it. But during that time, this is the year the job market just sucked. You know, it felt very much like AI was taking over the recruiting processes and it felt like it was just. It still feels a little like it's impossible. You find your dream job and within five minutes of the posting there are 200 applications and just like. And you.

Diana Alt [00:37:35]:
I mean that's not how that works, but I understand the discouragement.

Joey Senart [00:37:39]:
Yeah. Regardless of what is actually happening on LinkedIn viewing that job sees posted five minutes ago. 150 applicants. Yes, that's. That's all I can react to. Yeah. But anyway, during that time I really leveraged pretty hard. I've got 15 years of marketing, I've got 10 years of training.

Joey Senart [00:38:01]:
That should be great. That should. I should be fine. I've got all these big companies on my resume. I should have no problem getting picked up. Awful bad, bad approach to that. I learned that the hard way. Again, I think there was a time, but when Everything seems very flooded.

Joey Senart [00:38:21]:
Everybody has access to every job. Remote just basically means the world gets to see things and it's hard to cut through the clutter.

Diana Alt [00:38:28]:
Marketing is a second thing. Cut. No. L and D gets cut first, marketing second, and then marketing in quick succession. Unless there is a clear tie to the role and new revenue. To your point earlier.

Joey Senart [00:38:45]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm. I'm so. I'd be lying if I said that there weren't opportunities. There were ton. There's. There was a ton. I mean, during COVID LD, L&D space, instructional design blew up. There was so much money to be made during that time.

Joey Senart [00:38:58]:
And I didn't have any issues finding good marketing positions. I didn't. But I did lean a lot on. I was going to have all of my experience was just going to get me through to that interview process. And I put in 15 years of experience in email marketing and I put in all of these different. Here's the platforms that I've used. I've used Agility Harmony. I've used Precision Central, Constant Contact, mailchimp, Iterable, Clavio Braze.

Joey Senart [00:39:21]:
I threw all of them into this smorgasbord of I've got everything. And it didn't really help me at all. Diana. I don't really care. I'm going to say this knowing that I don't care about the technical piece of this. If I'm going to whip together a resume, which I know AI was just the big thing. Those are all words that are going to show up on a resume that I can just be thrown out into the ether. And I felt like that was ultimately what I was competing against.

Joey Senart [00:39:56]:
There was a point where I stopped appreciating that I am using my talent like I am. I'm being graded on my talents and I was being graded on my keywords. That's where I think it struggled a lot. Why my experience didn't matter. Why saying strategic combo platter meant nothing. Nobody's searching for strategic or combo or platter. The cute, fun, crafty ways that I can talk about myself, they're great. When I get through the door, they're not great.

Joey Senart [00:40:24]:
Not looking for those and putting everything out also, I don't think really helped me stand out in front of anything else.

Diana Alt [00:40:33]:
It doesn't like speaking as a career coach and a resume expert. Those things don't. And I work a lot, you know, when I work with a certain set of people, we actually literally get to remove the names of tech. Talk about classifications. I know Direct Response, Marketing I know email marketing, I know social marketing. You don't even have to talk about the platforms you work with or anything because you're going to be a VP of marketing and they need to know that you can be omnichannel. That's not the case ever with a marketing automations expert or anything. Development, yeah, same thing.

Diana Alt [00:41:12]:
But they don't need to know all of it. And that's the thing that I talk to people about. Like if they say that they use Braze, then what you do is you put Braze and then maybe like one or two others so that they know, oh well, this is not the only email that like this is a true email expert specializing in Braze. They didn't fall off the truck last night. But you don't list all the other ones until you apply for the, you know, if you're in a survival mode, having to apply for marketing automations that uses one of those other technologies, you're going to switch out the tech you talk about. You don't just throw every a resume with 10 email technologies out there.

Joey Senart [00:41:53]:
Yeah. And that's what I was doing to show the diversity. It's, it's a logical play. Like it's a great way to show experience is to show all of the experience that I have. It wasn't getting me anywhere.

Diana Alt [00:42:05]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [00:42:07]:
And this is, this is gonna, this is gonna end with a really wild punchline which I know you know, but it's, I still, it's still one of the just craziest things to me since 2024. But I'll get to it. So what I ended up doing was I switched my, I switched my tactic again. I stopped fighting against the keywords for just a general email developer position. I'm like, alright, I know Braze is new. I know it's ramping up. I know I'm going to get some pretty big companies in on this because that's an enterprise level type of company. So I'm going to shift my focus purely to it.

Joey Senart [00:42:39]:
That doesn't mean I shut everything else down, but it meant that I put Braze very front and center. So I had 10 years of email marketing, three years in braze. Yes. Experience in specific tools that I knew Braze uses. So I turned off experience in developing customer journeys and turned on experience using Canvas, Braze's specific tool to create customer journeys and liquid and things that any company, any manager, hiring manager who actually was using Braze, because no company look for an email developer is also trying to figure out what tool they're going to use. Right. They need a braze expert. They want a braze expert.

Joey Senart [00:43:21]:
And if they're looking for somebody in braze, they know those terms. Canvas.

Diana Alt [00:43:25]:
Did you just say canvas? Let me stop. Because this I think is important for people that are trying to craft these resumes or talk about themselves. Did you just say familiar using canvas? Did you say whatever Experience developing customer journeys with Canvas?

Joey Senart [00:43:44]:
I actually flipped it and said experience using canvas to develop customer journey.

Diana Alt [00:43:50]:
Customer journeys. Okay.

Joey Senart [00:43:51]:
On a quick skim. I wanted the word canvas to be in front of my three word buzzword of what this is.

Diana Alt [00:43:58]:
Got it, got it.

Joey Senart [00:43:59]:
I mean you and I have talked about. I don't like using, not using the experience lines of your resume to just explain what the job was. It's not a thing that I personally like doing. Like if you already know the job description.

Diana Alt [00:44:15]:
Anyone to do that?

Joey Senart [00:44:16]:
Yeah, like again, chatgpt, I switched you. I focused on very specific technology. I focused my job search on just like braze specific. Like find me the bullet point that says looking for these technologies and then especially braze. And I got infinitely more success. And I would maybe suggest that in the searches. Well, you know, ChatGPT can whip up praise iterable, Clavio Whatnot, but it's not going to spit up those specific features of the platform I'm trying to specialize in. I think that's where I got to really shine because I would get up, reached out to with recruiters if we're looking for somebody who's good with liquid, not with Braze, with liquid.

Joey Senart [00:45:00]:
And I made sure to stick that on. That's the, that's the syntax for dynamic publishing, by the way. That's a coding language that Braze uses. It's actually Shopify's language, but whatever. But making that switch, I even put in my LinkedIn headline like braze certified five times. Like it's one of the first words is brace certified. I went all, all in. Everything else was fluff.

Joey Senart [00:45:23]:
And after starting in 2024, I've had a couple of little shorter contracts. I've got a couple of projects I work on now. Not one of them I actually applied to.

Diana Alt [00:45:35]:
So you're getting from 10 months of unemployment when you were trying to be the strategic combo platter with.

Joey Senart [00:45:43]:
Yeah, General email marketing, Lifecycle marketing, General.

Diana Alt [00:45:47]:
Fully employed inbound in some cases. Like do I remember right? You've had periods where you were a little bit overemployed too.

Joey Senart [00:45:55]:
You had like I had three contracts stacked at a time. Yeah, that's a lot.

Diana Alt [00:46:01]:
Guys Way to go.

Joey Senart [00:46:02]:
There's a lot. Maybe don't do that. But also like, I, I needed to catch up from 10 months. Yeah. I will put in 80, 90 hours a week.

Diana Alt [00:46:10]:
I'm not. You were a contractor too. Like, that's your prerogative. That's your workload.

Joey Senart [00:46:16]:
Yeah. If you can. If you can handle the workloads. Yeah, then go for it.

Diana Alt [00:46:19]:
Just be. That's critical because a lot of what people are trying to do, they're trying to simultaneously get people to come in inbound, but they want to have their LinkedIn or their resume speak to everyone, especially their LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is hard because you can't have two or three versions of your resume. You can only have one. You have to make a lot of decisions with that.

Joey Senart [00:46:46]:
I got shredded with that. I also got shredded with doing the short term contracts. That's something I learned. I think you helped me on that one in our, In a random chat of all of my. Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:46:56]:
Did I tell you to group them together as.

Joey Senart [00:46:58]:
Group them together as freelance? Yeah. Because. Yeah, I would get booted out because I look like a job hopper.

Diana Alt [00:47:04]:
Oh, these are short term contracts, guys. So here's another tip. I know I really discourage people from using the term freelance unless there's a specific reason to. I consider it a word to avoid in most cases. Consultant.

Joey Senart [00:47:23]:
Is much better with even just contractor.

Diana Alt [00:47:26]:
Contractor is better than freelancer. The only thing that is expected than freelancer is VA because the term VA is virtual assistant is so bastardized.

Joey Senart [00:47:39]:
It's like instructional designer. It doesn't really mean anything.

Diana Alt [00:47:42]:
Yeah, for sure. Well, so, so you went to all inbound. You ended up being fully employed. Did you also find that your salary that you could command or your hourly rate or your salary or whatever, did that also go up or was it more of a matter of I can get the opportunity because once somebody wants to talk to me, I can land the job. Talk to us about that.

Joey Senart [00:48:06]:
Sure. So salary has always actually been pretty solid. And that's just, that's one of the luxuries of working for so many Fortune 5000. And I put very. I also put down for, you know, worked for a lot of Fortune.

Diana Alt [00:48:16]:
You're not scared to stay all the places.

Joey Senart [00:48:18]:
The value for me for something like that is people understand the stakes that I can handle. Like Fortune 500 is a lot of shakes. I'm sending out tens of millions of emails a day. Mistakes cost seven figures. So the, the, the salary was always pretty, pretty, pretty good. I wouldn't necessarily say I did have more opportunities to negotiate salary. How about I give you that.

Diana Alt [00:48:41]:
That's.

Joey Senart [00:48:42]:
That makes sense because I knew that I was being reached out to. Because I pointed out very specific experience.

Diana Alt [00:48:50]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:48:50]:
And kind of proved my expertise in that platform by just talking to those. Those keywords that are not auto generate, you know, they're not easy to auto generate. Your liquid, your canvas, your segment currents, alloys like again, tool specific made of like. Oh, he really knows this stuff.

Diana Alt [00:49:13]:
Really. I would, I would also say that number one, like I am. I'm working on resumes and LinkedIn every day for. For multiple technologies and industries and roles. And it's getting better. So what might have been the case a few months ago that ChatGPT or insert tool of choice did not know about those sub modules. Now it probably does, or three months from now it will. The combination of.

Diana Alt [00:49:42]:
I used this thing that supports this function. So canvas, that supports. What was it? Customer journeys.

Joey Senart [00:49:52]:
Customer journeys. Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:49:53]:
You can turn around and also layer in either in the same bullet or elsewhere in that work experience. And we did this. We. We.

Joey Senart [00:50:01]:
Yeah, I did that. My cover letter of just like here's here. Here's a bullet list of successes.

Diana Alt [00:50:07]:
Yes.

Joey Senart [00:50:08]:
And it was great. It worked wonderfully. I was gonna.

Diana Alt [00:50:12]:
I had a.

Joey Senart [00:50:13]:
Another point that I was gonna add to that. Now I don't remember what it was. It might have been a good one.

Diana Alt [00:50:20]:
We can do it again. I have a feeling that this will not be the last time that you and I spout off on live stream on the Internet.

Joey Senart [00:50:26]:
So I mean, end of it, like, end of the day, it made it very easy for people to see. Oh, he knew his stuff. Oh, that's what I was gonna say. This is, this is. This is also a little bit dark. I think that in the, in the salary conversation, I did get a little bit of the benefits of the garbage hire. When you have so many people who are coming through, you might have some people who are a little inexperienced. I had a number of those contracts that I ended up getting where I was replacing somebody who they brought in recently who was not nearly as good as their resume made them.

Joey Senart [00:51:04]:
Made them out to be. So it made it very easy for me to come in again. I win because I'm already using the terms that that other guy was bad at.

Diana Alt [00:51:13]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:51:14]:
I already knew that. I already knew he was getting bad at it. So I can come and be like, I know exactly how to fix these things and I can. I. I'm happy to share some of that in the interview just to prove that I'VE got the chops, but the rest you're paying for. Right. And instill. And it was a ton of instilling confidence.

Joey Senart [00:51:32]:
Not just that I understood what the issue was, but that I could go in and be real fast to identify and work and partner with those teams to be like, I am going to guide you out of the muck that you're in because you had to hire that struggle.

Diana Alt [00:51:47]:
Yeah, I. I love. I love talking about that because so many people. Yeah, I. I did interview prep with a guy who actually is an L and D leader just yesterday, and he is being. He's kind of about halfway through the. The process for a job in the gaming industry, which he's not a gamer. He came from other tech and whatnot.

Diana Alt [00:52:13]:
Like, he has no problem with gaming, but he's not like, oh, my God, it's my goal to work at this company.

Joey Senart [00:52:17]:
He's like, I had that. I had that dream one day.

Diana Alt [00:52:19]:
He wants to work. He wants to add value in an industry. This is an opportunity that the culture seems really great. And he DM'd me and said, hey, can we chat? I have this type of interview. I need you to help me sound smart. And I was like, no, we're gonna simplify. Yeah, spoiler alert. We're gonna simplify and be clear.

Diana Alt [00:52:42]:
Because the main thing that people walking into an interview trying to look smart or the people that are listing 10 email technologies or 23 programming languages or what have you, is that they're muddying the waters. And I'm a big fan of. If you're trying to like, number one statement is clarity is king in all things related to branding and marketing. And number two is if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

Joey Senart [00:53:09]:
Right.

Diana Alt [00:53:09]:
So you basically just shed all that nonsense, put it all aside in favor of clarity.

Joey Senart [00:53:17]:
So if you had a decent solve for something like that, this is the way that I've approached it in my interviews, when, if you have a ton of experience, it's not my advice, you can speak truth to it. I did have all of this experience with all these other tools and all these other teams. I didn't exactly want to throw that away. So the way that I framed it in those interviews where I am coming in for a very specific goal, was I've had the luxury of working with a bunch of different platforms and a bunch of different teams, which means I've grown very adept to seeing different processes and seeing how different pieces of the puzzle come together for a common goal. And I've gotten very good at maneuvering different configurations of this.

Diana Alt [00:54:01]:
Right.

Joey Senart [00:54:02]:
I leave it there. I just leave it there. And that ultimately means that I'm incredibly adaptable. I'm very quick to learn. I've gotten very good at relationship building because the goal posts are always moving, the rules are always changing and that is the only time that I really bring in all of those other tools, technologies, the smorgasbord of contracts and it actually, I'm not struggling.

Diana Alt [00:54:26]:
I love that you said this because there's a whole different dynamic going on and what you just talked about can help in any industry. So here's what's going on. I work with tons of product managers because I spent almost a decade doing product, product adjacent things. And there is, as the economy has got or the job market in tech has gotten weirder, there's been more companies saying that they want all this product management skill. And on teen years in industry, the best product managers I know are industry agnostic. So there's a lot of people that are like, I want to make a pivot out of the biggest one I hear is ad tech. Because ad tech is like, that's just.

Joey Senart [00:55:09]:
It's rough.

Diana Alt [00:55:09]:
Yeah, it's very rough. And that it's commoditized too. So that's not a really fun place to be. And people say, how the heck do I get out of this? Because everybody wants five years of experience in the next thing. And what you just did is basically a real world practical example of how you talked about a thing. I coach my clients that they should go for, which is to build yourself as an adaptable learner. And it's weirdly easier to do that when you've worked in two other industries than when it's been only one. So if you've been two or three industries.

Diana Alt [00:55:43]:
I learned health tech and I learned fintech and I learned gaming. If you're only trying to go from ad tech into something else, the story is a little bit harder, but it's still the same story. So thank you for sharing that because that's going to help a lot of different people.

Joey Senart [00:55:59]:
Yeah. The whole idea behind Strategic combo Platter was to show diversity in expertise. And I don't think it ever actually worked. I think it became a fluffy little fun little word.

Diana Alt [00:56:13]:
I almost took it out of your bio actually, because I knew that you were moving away from that. But I wanted to keep like I.

Joey Senart [00:56:20]:
Thought it was cute again. It's fun when I'm able to get the interview and I'm very conversational. So I get to say I was like, I'm. Like I'm a strategic combo platter. And it's kind of like a throwaway phrase. But it's definitely. It's not what I should really be sharing on the first date.

Diana Alt [00:56:36]:
But it's kind of like me saying I'm a no BS career coach. Like, it's true, but people don't hire me for that. They look at my profile because.

Joey Senart [00:56:45]:
Yeah, exactly.

Diana Alt [00:56:46]:
Follow me for, God, sometimes years. And then they hire me.

Joey Senart [00:56:50]:
Yeah. And I still have fluffy language. Like, my first words are empathetic innovator in marketing execution. But then I just go straight into brace certified. Well, yeah, my headline's a little. My headline's a little fluffy. But Also I have 5 times braid certified as the first thing in there. Personality in there.

Joey Senart [00:57:10]:
Everything else still points to specific terms, specific tools, specific tech. And then using the muddied waters of my career as a superpower.

Diana Alt [00:57:19]:
Yeah, I think that that's really. I dealt with a lot of that. So I know a lot of people that had. Early in their career, we had a recession. So for me, I had the dot com bubble bursting. Some people that are a few years younger than me, it was like the Great Recession. And figuring out how to take instability and turn it into a superpower is a really great thing to do for me. I ended up working across multiple industries, so it was easy for me to play adaptable and I can learn.

Diana Alt [00:57:48]:
And, you know, I had true consulting at the beginning of my career. And so I was honestly able to say to people, you get your highest value out of me in the first two years I'm in a role, you know, I need to transfer within two to three years to start working in a different function or go to a different company to maximize what I'm greatest at. I want to turn our attention to. I have a couple of little, like lightning roundish questions and then I want to let people. Well, we've got your LinkedIn up. If there's anything else you want to tell people about opportunities you're interested in, etc. And then we can end there. So my first question is, what is the worst piece of career advice that you've ever received?

Joey Senart [00:58:33]:
The worst piece of career. The worst piece of career advice that I ever received was if you do really well at this job, you're going to get promoted. Oh, yes. That is not a thing.

Diana Alt [00:58:46]:
My work will speak for itself.

Joey Senart [00:58:49]:
Yeah. No. And I've been enough of a victim to things like the Peter Principle to know that I don't always want somebody who's good at their job to get promoted.

Diana Alt [00:58:58]:
Those of you who don't know the.

Joey Senart [00:58:59]:
Peter principle, that is getting promoted to the point of incompetence, where the skills that got you to the promotion are no longer useful for the job you currently hold. That is when your big tech guys, who are all about awesome coding, become people managers. And all they know how to do is code and not be people managers.

Diana Alt [00:59:15]:
Right? Yes.

Joey Senart [00:59:17]:
Yeah, I hate that. I hate that advice.

Diana Alt [00:59:20]:
What is a personal habit you have that's made a big difference in your life?

Joey Senart [00:59:25]:
I. Oh, man. A personal habit. Can I go with mannerism?

Diana Alt [00:59:30]:
Sure.

Joey Senart [00:59:31]:
Okay. As you can tell, I'm very animated in how I talk. It comes across very. It can come across very unprofessionally depending on who I talk to. And I've gotten very good at maneuvering how I speak and how I discuss and how I use my words without necessarily throwing away that personality and still being able to succeed somewhere. Oh, man, that was a challenge.

Diana Alt [00:59:57]:
You know how to dial it.

Joey Senart [00:59:59]:
I've learned how to dial it. I think the greatest thing was, I told you at the beginning, I got fired from constant contact because I did not know how to speak this way. If I were to go back and do my career again, that's the one thing I would not change. I needed to fail so hard in that in order to recognize, like, okay, I can still, I can still talk this way and bring in personality, but I need to know how to stay in my lane. I need to know how to respect time, respect, need. If I want to throw in a little banter, a little wit, a little self deprecation, if I want to throw in a little something to ease the mood and disarm. What I love is disarm.

Diana Alt [01:00:39]:
And the older I get, it doesn't play as well. I think in 10 years I'll hit another age marker where I can do it again, but in a corporate setting. I can do it in my current business. But there's a really cool person I've been following for a while on LinkedIn and TikTok that talks about some of this stuff. Her name is Grace McCarrick and she. She nominally does soft skills for Gen Z or soft skills, oh boy, leaders. But I'm a Gen Xer going, God, I wish I would have had you 20 years ago. And so she talks about things like how to bring the.

Diana Alt [01:01:18]:
Like, what is polish look like? What does professionalism look like? How do you. What are high performers actually concerned with and not concerned with what what are the hills that they're dying on? It's pretty cool. So I.

Joey Senart [01:01:33]:
So this kind of goes all the way back to where I said, trust is so important and why it's so important. I don't think I can say I'm confident being kind of the animated goofy person I have in any company that would not trust my ability to get things done. Yeah. So I can come. Like, I'm. I talk with senior vice presidents now, and I come and I say, here we go. And that is how I will start a meeting. That might be a little bit rough, because there's enough trust that I've been able to instill and enough confidence in my abilities that when I can say something like that, they don't look and be like, oh, he's just gonna not take this thing seriously.

Joey Senart [01:02:08]:
Yeah, I've proven that I know what I'm doing. I come in, and they trust that I'm going to be able to figure this out. So I get a little bit of leeway and flexibility on how I communicate it. That takes work. That whole thing about everything we just talked about, about speaking to specific skills and whatnot, none of it works. If you don't come in with a ton of confidence. If you sound like you're bumbling through why having so much diversity is a superpower, it really looks like you don't actually know what you learned.

Diana Alt [01:02:38]:
It sounds like you don't believe that. The bullshit you're selling, to be honest. And then they don't trust you because it's like I'm trying to get you to buy a product that you don't even believe in yourself.

Joey Senart [01:02:50]:
I genuinely feel like all of those experience helped me get to where I am now, and I'm very confident when I say that. Same with being quirky. As a superpower, I disarm very well, but it's because I come in with so much confidence for why we're there. I know when to buckle down and actually get work done that I've been able to turn the silliness of me into something that gets people really absorbed and engaged in solutioning. And I never lose sight that we are here to solve. We are here to do better.

Diana Alt [01:03:18]:
I talk about there's so many different workplace situations that people bring to me, and they're trying to figure out how do I turn this into something that is more positive, more collaborative, like, whatever. The more that they want is and the less struggle. And almost always it boils down into some version of, you need to get everybody on the Same side of a mission, instead of it being you versus Mary or you versus a competitor. Like, what is the mission here? Okay. We're trying to achieve these customer satisfaction targets, these revenue targets. Maintain these values, whatever it is, get everybody on board with it.

Joey Senart [01:03:58]:
I think that's where the art of disarming really comes in handy. Yes. Of everybody comes in with their own different expectations. I'm going to pull you down to my level in a simple way, and then we're going to all move in the same direction together. I did it during training. That's how I did it during training. I've been able to do it in speaking to bigger names. At the end of the day, they want number go up, numbers go up.

Diana Alt [01:04:22]:
Cool.

Joey Senart [01:04:22]:
Let's make the numbers go up.

Diana Alt [01:04:24]:
How much and how is it going to help us? The last question I have for you before we close is, what is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Joey Senart [01:04:35]:
Changed my mind. Something I changed my mind on recently. And this is really the result of just those. The two. The last two years has been that I have been my own worst enemy.

Diana Alt [01:04:45]:
Realize that you have been your own worst enemy.

Joey Senart [01:04:48]:
I've changed my. I've changed the idea that I've been my own worst enemy throughout my career. When you're unemployed for 10 months, by month 4, 5, 6, 7, you start looking at everything you do and saying that you're the problem.

Diana Alt [01:05:00]:
Okay.

Joey Senart [01:05:00]:
And that doesn't mean that you're not doing. You could still be doing some things wrong. See, six months. Six months. Six months job instead of batch. Like there are some little, little tangible things. But there was that big hesitation of, is this my personality? Maybe I, maybe I, you know that all the imposter syndrome stuff comes in and I put a lot of that pressure on. Maybe I'm not cut out for this.

Joey Senart [01:05:26]:
I suspect. God, when you're changing jobs, you're like, maybe this is the wrong job. Maybe this is the wrong place. And I became my own worst enemy. I'm not good enough for this. I'm not putting this together. And it really was just change in tactic, change in. For every single thing we have talked about and every single thing that I think you talk about ever is just a change in verbiage.

Diana Alt [01:05:47]:
Yeah.

Joey Senart [01:05:47]:
Approach. It's change in how you sell yourself and put yourself out in the world. And I stopped thinking that if it's not working, it's some inherent problem with me.

Diana Alt [01:05:57]:
Yeah. I think that they're. They're one of the biggest things that I talk a lot about and A lot of times people, they use this advice the wrong way for a little while till they get grounding in it. Talk a lot about understanding what you can and can't control. And the only thing that you control is what's going on between your two ears, which when you kind of get to the point that you grok that it's so powerful. But almost everybody goes through a period in the middle where they're like, well, then I'm terrible. Like, all these things are happening because I'm terrible and I'm trying to control me. And it's really nuanced what you can and can't control when we parse through things so well.

Diana Alt [01:06:43]:
Thank you for sharing that. And I'm glad that you feel better about Joey.

Joey Senart [01:06:47]:
Yes, I feel better about that. I've also been so blessed with some of the jobs that I've had in that stretch where I did get to prove to myself that I'm a badass. And I get to. I have no problem saying that there's so much of this. Like, maybe you come across as too cocky. But at the end of the day, if I'm in a room where numbers need to go up, being able to come in confident, like, I made numbers go up and I feel real good about it, that does so much more. And that's another one of those, like, worst enemy things. It's like, maybe I'm.

Joey Senart [01:07:18]:
Maybe I'm too full of crap. Maybe I'm putting too much pressure on, like, one or two things and nobody actually cares. Maybe I'm not nearly as accomplished as I thought I was. All those little. All those little psychological crap tactics.

Diana Alt [01:07:30]:
The real deal is you have a lot of things that you've done and different people are going to care and need different things.

Joey Senart [01:07:36]:
Yeah. And I think, honestly, shaping all of that into different work experiences. I've worked with a whole bunch of different processes and I can adapt to it. I think that's really kind of what the solve was for all of that. Of this isn't. I'm not just a muddy mess of experiences that don't form one single tangible thing. I'm a muddy mess of experiences that make a tapestry of insanity that I can make whatever the hell I want. Show me what's wrong with your business.

Joey Senart [01:08:02]:
I know how to fix it.

Diana Alt [01:08:04]:
Well, Joey, thank you so much. I've got your LinkedIn up on the screen. If people want to find you're trying to other. Other than keep it going with your current cool projects that are any other things that you're working on or I'm.

Joey Senart [01:08:23]:
Working on being a dad. I've got a two year old. I've got an almost two year old. That's that's that I've also in 2024 you catch catching up. For 2023 I was triple stacked. I was working my butt off. So honestly all I'm working on is trying to normalcy nice and I'm fine with normalcy. I don't, I don't need any new.

Joey Senart [01:08:44]:
I don't need anything new.

Diana Alt [01:08:45]:
Write a book or develop your own AI based SaaS platform which is I swear I know 5 people that are doing both of those things things right now.

Joey Senart [01:08:52]:
I am, I am writing but that's just like it's a fun for me project. It's not like a work. I, I'm done. I'm not going to do the self help thing but yeah, there is that. You know I busted my butt so much I'm trying to go back to just enjoying free time. You know we were joking of like not working should also feel good. I'm also working on that and that is a much more important project project than anything else I'm working on right now.

Diana Alt [01:09:15]:
I've seen pictures of baby girl and she's adorable and so I can fully understand wanting to hang out with her way more than you got to last year. Thank you so much Joey. This was amazing and I appreciate you coming on. Work should feel good.

Joey Senart [01:09:30]:
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

Diana Alt [01:09:32]:
Hey, are you sabotaging your job search without even realizing it? You might be. I break down the most common job search mistakes and how to fix them in my free [email protected] so go grab it today. And that's it for this episode of Work should feel good. If something made you laugh, think, cry or just want to yell yes at your phone, send it to a friend, hit follow, hit subscribe, do all the things and even better, leave a review if you've got a sec. I'm not going to tell you to give it five stars. You get to decide if I earned it.

Joey Senart [01:10:09]:
We're to going.

Diana Alt [01:10:10]:
Work should feel good. Let's make that your reality.