You Are the Sum of Your Accumulated Knowledge and Experience

Someone recently told me, "It's been fun watching you evolve and continue to reinvent yourself," which I'd never thought much about until recently. But after mulling it over for a few weeks, it became clear how much I have evolved (and had to evolve) over the past 30 years since I began my career in the powersports industry.

My career began in 1993 as a draftsman for Cometic Gasket in Mentor, Ohio. Soon after, I became interested in marketing and focused on building a race team, attending races, meeting people, and building awareness for the company and its products.

I landed a job with the iconic racing brand Alpinestars in 1997 as Media Relations Manager based in Asolo, Italy. There I learned to work with and build relationships with the endemic motorcycle media and publications outside of the industry. Later in my career, I realized just how valuable that experience was because of how often I have used those media relations skills and knowledge since.

After returning from Italy, I moved to Idaho to accept a Motorsports Promotions Manager position with Smith Optics in the Ketchum/Sun Valley area, where I built a successful team of professional athletes to represent the brand. But after three years of nonstop travel, I quit and moved to Boise to pursue a college degree at Boise State University. While there, I began to take an interest in creative writing and pursued a degree in English with an emphasis on technical and business writing.

After graduating, I was hired by Boise-based wholesaler Western Power Sports (WPS) as a content manager, which entailed (at first) managing data and product descriptions for its hundreds of thousands of distributed products. With no one driving the company's marketing and media relations efforts, I used my past knowledge and experience to help build the WPS marketing department over the next 11 years, expanding to more than 15 people before I departed in 2018.

Along the way, I began to take on more and more writing projects, honing my skills as the repetition of practicing something repeatedly only can. As writing became a higher percentage of my daily work, I took those skills to Tucker Powersports in Texas, where I was hired as the company's Marketing Content Manager, Copywriter, and Blogger. I produced hundreds of articles, press releases, and other content while continuing to hone my writing skills.

Then in 2020, I was furloughed, and a few months later, my job was eliminated. I didn't know what was next, so I focused on freelance writing for the powersports industry. Today, I am a full-time writer and small business owner with my company Buzz Media LLC. It's the culmination of over 30 years of experience in the powersports industry and the result of the accumulated knowledge accompanying it.

Here's what my career path looks like over the last 30+ years:

Looking at all these jobs, I realize now, in one form or another, each role has influenced who I am today. Each has contributed to my collective life experience by teaching me unique skills and life lessons. Experience that gave me the confidence to evolve and reinvent myself today as a writer.