Insights From a Middle School Teacher Turned Marketing Director
Holly Richards is a shapeshifter.
Her career journey started in education, teaching language arts to middle and high school students. What she most adored about teaching also became the reason she left: while she loved her students’ growth and development, it was hard to remain detached. Ultimately she needed better work/life balance.
So, Holly went back to school and studied multimedia design, a path that led her to working as a UX/UI designer for Dish Network. In her nine-year run at Dish, she went from web design to marketing lead, and then manager of partner marketing. Finally, she ended up in commercial branding, where she built the wireless team from scratch.
It was here, in this nebulous new space, that Holly found her jam: “I tend to lean into things that are fuzzy and undefined. I love developing processes and plans and building teams, and figuring out how we conquer the hard stuff.”
I love developing processes and plans and building teams, and figuring out how we conquer the hard stuff.
During her time at Dish, Holly met our Chief Marketing Officer, Kim Storin, whom Holly cites as a role model. This led to her transition to Zayo years ago. In the time since Holly has shifted once again — from revenue marketing to vertical marketing to product and vertical marketing.
Reflecting on her early experience as a teacher, Holly says she has taken a couple of salient points into her current role:
- Just like teaching, marketing is all about taking complex things and making them easier to understand. To be effective with your customers, you have to be able to deliver a clear message.
- From a leadership capacity, teaching revealed how much Holly enjoys facilitating growth. Whether leading a group of middle schoolers or a marketing team, leadership is really about building the scaffold or support structure to help individuals grow independently.
Holly likes to think big — like Zayo, she sets the bar higher and higher. She recognizes that marketing, like virtually every other industry, must constantly evolve to meet the ever-changing demands and challenges of AI and data collection.
She is seeing Zayo through its own growth period, too. As more of our clients require managing services in addition to our legacy products, Holly is helping her sales team undergo its own metamorphosis, helping them gain familiarity with selling holistic solutions. “Marketing,” Holly says, now involves “hyper-targeted, multi-tactic approaches. You have to make sure you’re serving the right customer at the right time with the right voice and messaging. We’re providing a complete experience.”
So what’s the next shift for Holly? She says one day she’d like to be a CMO, hopefully for a tech or software start-up — something she can build from scratch.
Her advice to young professionals starting out in their careers: “Don’t be afraid to change.” Holly has shown us how aspiring to do more and constantly learning new things can bring you to the right place.