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A Happy Birthday & Girls Who Code

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This blog post is a little more personal that the ones we usually post because it’s a celebration.  Smarter Searches is celebrating its second birthday throughout the month of October, because the only thing better than a birthDAY is an entire BIRTHDAY MONTH.

It’s been so much work to get us where we are today, but it has always been worth it. I work many more hours than I ever have before but it’s more rewarding, more fun, more challenging, and more exciting than any task I have undertaken up to this point.

I’ve been in the digital marketing industry for nearly ten years now and it changes daily.  But the one thing that stays the same is that the user comes first. What has made us successful over the last two years is that we haven’t forgotten about the user in that time.  We haven’t devalued startups over bigger budgets, we haven’t made sales just to make sales, and we have never focused on profit and algorithms over customer success. As a result, our clients experience higher conversion rates, better quality scores, and better results. It’s results – nothing less.

For this second birthday, we are doing two big events to celebrate.  First, we’re having a great party at Club LeConte on October 16th with our friends, coworkers, referral partners, and supporters, as a way of thanking them for their endless support, hard work, and ceaseless and boundless love.

The second part of our celebration was with a corporate sponsorship to the TN Code Academy’s initiative 100 Girls of Code, which seeks to increase access to computer programming and science and technology fields for girls in the southeast.  Deciding to become a corporate sponsor was almost a no-brainer I believe in this so fundamentally.  Women are dramatically underrepresented in the tech field and we want to see as many girls given the opportunity to learn to code as possible.  Having been the only woman on a web team filled with men, having been treated as inferior because of my gender by clients in the past, I want to ensure that these girls never have to face that. That these girls are never hear that women refraining from asking for a raise is good karma (like Microsoft’s CEO said in an interview). Or that they are never treated “Like Men: Only Cheaper” as entrepreneur Evan Thornley posted at a Sydney Startup Conference. Or when Matt Lauer asked GM CEO how she would do her job effectively having two kids, despite the fact that he seems to do okay with his three kids. Sadly, there are many more instances of the gender disparity and whatever we can do to help bridge the gap – we will.

So here’s to many more years at Smarter Searches, many more birthdays, many more girls who code, many more clients happy and pleased with our work, many more that we can continue to do what we love. Thanks for your support.

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