Ask a Social Expert Anything…
by Meghan D’Arcy
The young professional generation is comprised of thinkers. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we won’t stay at our first job after college for 40 years and become complacent. We want to chase opportunities, explore our options and find our calling. Sometimes that means working jobs that make us horribly miserable until we find The One. In Scott Bishop’s case, it took three cities, one professional group, countless networking events and nine years after college to realize his dream and he’s enjoyed every moment of the journey. Well, maybe not every moment, but doesn’t that sound poetic?
“I finally got to the point where I wasn’t happy with where I was. I just decided to jump off the bridge and find out if I could swim. I’ve always believed that you have to scare yourself every once in a while to test yourself,” Bishop said. After working for years in the marketing and sales industries, Bishop had found himself working as a marketer for a publishing company in Chicago, Illinois. It was traditional marketing with no room for creativity and certainly no need for digital marketing, which Bishop found himself drawn to. So he left his job, moved to St. Louis, Missouri and started his own company, Crave Engine. Crave Engine specializes in digital marketing and social media to provide businesses with an online presence, help them generate awareness and increase sales. “Why I like to go to work is that it allows for creativity. You actually get to solve problems and get paid to do it.”
Crave Engine has been in business for a year and a half and Bishop has no intention of trying to grow the business or turn it into an agency. It’s been his life for the past year and a half, in fact he admits he doesn’t really have hobbies outside of work. That’s lucky for him considering he now works two jobs after moving to Omaha two months ago to accept the position of Director of Social Influence at Bozell, an integrated marketing agency. His responsibilities at Bozell are the same as at Crave Engine, but he enjoys that he now has a team and can really focus on his interests. At Crave Engine he takes on many other duties such as billing and searching for new business, and that hinders his ability to research and truly know digital marketing inside and out. But he still maintains that starting his business was one of his best decisions, and one that has affected his entire career and life.
“Everything I’ve done in the past year and a half has led me to where I am right now. For some people that’s not a big deal, but I’m finally at a place where I’m happy, I’m living in a town that I actually consider home, I like living here, I like the people here, I like where I work and I like what I do. That’s just a very different place from where I’ve been since I got out of college,” Bishop said. If he’s had to read and write a lot, forego fun activities for work activities and postpone settling down, it’s all worth it to be in Omaha and have what he has now.
Bishop has always been a go-getter. While living and working in Chicago, Illinois, Bishop and two friends started Social Media Breakfast, a networking organization. It was held in the morning to attract high-level executives who can’t make happy hour events because they have families. It also consisted of mini-roundtable discussions rather than presenters and panels, and seats were limited to 50 or 60 instead of 200. Leave it to a marketer to increase demand.
Bishop advises anyone in any industry to make use of every opportunity that presents itself. “Everything is a stepping stone for something else. No one’s going to pick up the phone and call you, you have to go out there and make things happen. And then all of a sudden things just start falling in your lap and you don’t know where they came from but if you really want to analyze it, they come from the last year of working your tail off.”
To learn more about Crave Engine, visit craveengine.com. To follow Bishop’s blog, check out realtimemarketer.com.
