Employee Spotlight with Mark, Red House Marketing Coordinator

You may not have realized it, but you’ve probably had some sort of passing interaction with our Red House Marketing Coordinator, Mark. Whether via our monthly newsletter, weekly blog posts, or through your social media feed, Mark is the go-to guy for content creation and lead generation at Red House. Let’s learn a little more about Mark before he zooms off to post his next article. 

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Mark.

Well, I’m a southern boy, having grown up in North Carolina. After I graduated from college, I moved to NYC on a whim with some friends and lived there for five years. I eventually got burned out managing coffee shops in the city and decided to apply to grad school for interior architecture. On April 1st, 2015, I got word that I’d been accepted to RISD’s graduate program (April Fool’s Day, mind you, so I had to double-check that it wasn’t some cruel prank). But it wasn’t, and two months later, I moved to Rhode Island with my girlfriend and started summer classes. Two months after that, I married my girlfriend; two months after THAT, we bought a 140-year-old two-family home we found on Craigslist (which is a whole other story). Since then, I graduated from the RISD program, taught design-build to highschoolers, helped design hotels around the world, got a second dog, opened a visitor center for the Parks Department, maintained trails in Rhode Island’s Arcadia Recreation Area, celebrated an eight-year wedding anniversary, began hosting trivia nights, and of course, started at Red House.

What sort of things does the role of Marketing Coordinator entail?

As the marketing coordinator, my main responsibility is to find creative ways to attract potential clients to work with Red House on their home renovation projects. Doing this requires a thorough understanding of how Red House operates, who our ideal clients are, what kind of services they need, and what their expectations are when working with a design-build company. That not only means creating precisely tailored content for our website, blog, and social media outlets but also tracking analytics, staying up to date on trends, coordinating photoshoots, organizing charity events, and more. 

What do you find most rewarding about your job?

I love learning new things, but even more so, I love finding ways to use past experiences to solve seemingly disparate problems. Being a marketing coordinator encourages creative and lateral thinking to solve the myriad of challenges that pop up in the marketing realm. It means no two days are the same–one day, I could be helping prep for a design presentation; the next, I could be working on a Red House coloring book. It’s really satisfying and fun to have so many irons in the fire. And don’t get me started on how addictive it is to collect “likes” on social media

What do you enjoy doing outside of work? 

I love to garden and cook, so I spend a lot of time doing that. I also like working on various projects in my cobbled-together woodshop and just making things in general. I have a good group of friends who I play trivia with most weeks and sometimes DnD. I’m a fervent Liverpool FC supporter, so on matchday, you’ll find me glued to the tv at home or chanting with the other fans at Murphy’s in Downtown Providence. 

What’s your favorite spot in Rhode Island?

It’s gotta be Arcadia Management Area in southern RI. It’s 14,000 acres of publicly accessible land and even spills over into Connecticut. There are tons of hiking trails, streams, waterfalls, cliffs, swimming holes, wildlife, the Tomaquag Museum, mushroom foragers, bird watchers…it’s just so good. During the pandemic, I got to do some trail maintenance for a few weeks throughout Arcadia. It was physically demanding but incredibly rewarding. One day in January, we spent hours clearing frozen earth that had accumulated in an old drainage channel with pickaxes. We eventually uncovered the cobblestone pavers that had originally been laid in the 1930s by the Citizens Conservation Corps as part of the New Deal. It was really cool to be a part of that legacy. There are lots of things like that in Arcadia. 

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Talk to animals. Full stop. 

And that wraps it up! Thanks for your time, Mark!

No, thank you, Mark.