2017 - 2020
Sell construction services to owners, real estate developers, governments, capital groups, and hotel flags in the United States, but mainly on various Caribbean islands. This goal was achieved by creating relationships with project stakeholders through cold emails that featured sales collateral that I made. The result was $16 million in sales directly from me and a $120 million project that came in through the website after I implemented a new SEO strategy.
Before COVID forced the layoff of almost every employee at the company (no one is building in the Caribbean when no one is legally allowed to get there), I had a nine-month tenure in the BD role. In that time, I was on track to double my lead goal and brought in $16 million in sales in the Bahamas. This accomplishment was possible by extensively researching upcoming projects (which is difficult because owners try to keep these projects as hidden as possible), identifying key stakeholders, getting the correct contact information, contacting them with the collateral I made, and ultimately fostering the relationship until the engineering team could come in to estimate the project.
I brought in $16 million in sales by correctly identifying new markets that fit our business model, pitching the managers my thoughts, and going after those markets. I also worked to diversify income risk by going after markets outside the Caribbean. I worked with developers in Florida, but we could not see how this strategy would work as COVID took the company down quickly in March 2020. Before I worked in BD, I used to help out HR. I did this by negotiating down most of their contracts with job boards as well as developing an online applicant tracking system. The company was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on recruiters. So me and this guy in IT made a tracking system that was much faster than their original method while also giving them the ability to quickly search through old candidates when a new position opens up. Each candidate hired out of that database that’s been in there longer than three months saves the company between 10-30k. This implementation now saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One task I had at all three positions I held at dck was graphic design. As an intern, I recognized the importance of a solid visual impression to a construction company. I learned the Adobe Suite in my free time after work and began working on projects for dck. I ultimately ended up creating documents for many departments, including Marketing (for social media), Business Development, IT (for company website), HR (for hiring and training papers), and Safety. The main contribution was the collateral I made for the BD team. The goal of the marketing department was to assist the BD team in generating revenue. The collateral before my tenure there was dated, so I updated it, which led to over a billion dollars in construction contracts. One trick to making this successful was making robust templates that allowed me to tailor each package quickly to match our experience to our target client. It was a method similar to tailoring one’s resume to a job listing, except this was done on documents that were sometimes over 40 pages long. The templates allowed them to be customized in under an hour.
On top of the business development team, one way dck could increase brand awareness, and ultimately more sales, was improving SEO. When I started working for dck in 2017, they had just launched a new website. I took on the responsibility of optimizing the website, which resulted in a 239% increase in web traffic from Google a year after the new strategy was implemented. This also helped generate a lead through the “Contact Us” section of the website that concluded with signing a $120,000,000 project.
Part of my responsibilities under this umbrella included graphics, copy, and strategy. As an intern, I performed an analysis of their current strategy and platforms. This research concluded with abandoning Instagram and Twitter to focus on our highest performing platforms, LinkedIn and Facebook. After a year, dck had double the followers on Facebook and 1/3 more followers on LinkedIn. You can see some examples of posts below.
The copywriting responsibilities included many ad hoc projects for internal emails sent throughout the company, copy for social media, and copy in sales collateral.
I did not design this entire website, but I did make certain pages on the website as the company wanted to feature different offerings. This allowed me to gain experience with Wordpress.
