Writers Tricks of the Trade ISSUE 1, VOLUME 9 | Page 8

While taking my residential marketing
class at UCLA, I met one of the vice presi-
dents of a Glendale, California development
corporation. They built housing tracts and
did condo conversions. We struck up a
friendship and he appeared very interested
in my interior design career. I will add here,
I was the only interior designer in that pro-
gram. Everyone else was either in real es-
tate or some related field. Eventually he
gave Carol and me the opportunity to sub-
mit a proposal for four model homes and
introduced me to other executives and the
CEO of the corporation. The project unfor-
tunately was put on hold because it was to
have a man-made lake and there was a wa-
ter shortage. But, he and other members of
his company had gotten to know me and
seen what I could do.
To my surprise, they made me an offer
I couldn’t refuse. They had attempted to
establish an in-house design department
for over five years, but never found the
right person. Not only that, but they never
interviewed a woman for the job. Now they
wanted me. I was in the midst of a divorce
and when I told Carol what it would mean
to me to have a steady income, she offered
to buy me out. I became their Director of
Design with responsibility for setting up
the department from scratch, resourcing,
establishing forms and procedures, hiring
and training personnel, designing models,
sales offices, common areas and the design
centers and interacting with their advertising
company. While I’d never done anything
that extensive, I heard Mom’s voice in my
ear: “You can do it, Honey. I believe in you.”
During that time I wrote multiple de-
sign articles for publications and was a
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speaker at ASID events. Me—the designer
without her degree giving advice to mem-
bers of that prestigious society. My friends
at Designer’s West still requested articles
from me as well.
When the housing industry was deci-
mated by interest rates rising to as high as
18% in 1981, residential developers were
literally hanging on by their fingernails. It
had to come to pass. My boss made the
hard decision to let me go because the
combined salaries of both designers I
trained would cost less than my salary. We
parted on friendly terms. Never having re-
ally done sales before, I got a job in office
interior sales.
With my confidence in myself at full
tilt, I negotiated a higher salary than any of
the other marketing reps at the dealership.
Once again, Mom’s voice echoed in my
ear—”You can do this, Honey.” Our VP of
Marketing was a master trainer and I owe
all my future sales successes to him. During
my time in design sales, I wrote more arti-
cles for various publications on multiple
topics. I discovered that I had a real talent
for sales and marketing, and my ability to
write articles was a plus.
Years passed. Although I didn’t know
an amp from an ohm, I was hired as part of
a national marketing team to introduce a
state of the art product called flat cable
which delivered power, telephone and data
to open office areas. I beat out 125 appli-
cants with electrical engineering degrees. I
believed I could do it.
For five years I was a partner in The
House Account, a marketing and promotion
firm and we dealt heavily in barter. My
partner was an expert in that field and I
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W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE