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Employees today need to strike the right balance for themselves between being available after hours for their company and having a life -- and they need to communicate those boundaries.
Being your own boss requires more than just hanging out a shingle. Do your homework before you take the plunge.
"I've always been an outdoors person," says Rob Nodine. "I put myself through college working for the Bureau of Land Management as a wildland firefighter."
As the City of Seattle’s lead light rail engineer, Katherine Claeys has seen the project through three years of environmental impact planning and four years of construction.
Bryan LaComa, a designer at the sustainable landscaping company In Harmony, creates dozens of residential landscape plans each year.
Bio Michelle Goodman Author of the "The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube" (Seal Press) and the popular blog, Anti9to5Guide.com. A full-time freelance writer, she frequently contributes articles on job satisfaction and...
"I never thought my silly Internet addictions would actually be useful," says freelance writer and author Ariel Meadow Stallings. As a marketing manager on the software giant's staffing team, the Seattleite spends much of her time publishing "Microspotting" , a blog profiling some of Microsoft's most notable employees
Between 1994 and 2005, Laura Michalek owned and operated four vintage furniture shops in Seattle. A self-professed "junker," she'd put 60,000 miles on her car every year just trolling for antique treasure at estate sales and auctions. Somewhere along the way, she became sold on the idea of grabbing a microphone and working as a full-time auctioneer herself.
If you commute to work, chances are you know Adam Gehrke. During the past decade, his morning and afternoon traffic reports have dominated the airwaves on multiple radio stations around the Puget Sound.
For chocoholic Jean Thompson, life is sweet. As co-owner and CEO of Seattle Chocolates, the 15-year-old company she and her husband first invested in eight years ago and became sole owners of in 2005, she has the delectable task of developing, marketing and packaging wholesale lines of truffles and premium chocolates.
Volcanoes, shipwrecks, seismic faults – for Joanna O'Neill, it's all in a day's work. As a marine geologist for Fugro Seafloor Surveys in downtown Seattle, she spends part of the year on land and part of the year at sea, creating topographic maps of the ocean floor.
Certified Financial Planner Geleg Kyarsip has spent the past two decades helping people from all walks of life work toward their financial and retirement goals. In March of 2000, he founded Kyarsip Financial Advisors in downtown Seattle, a financial planning firm that charges clients by the hour rather than getting paid through commissions.
When Patrick Angus studied art history at Western Washington University, he never imagined he'd wind up flexing his creative muscle in upscale retail. Today, as creative director of Mario's in downtown Seattle, he wears many hats. He manages the visual display of merchandise. He orchestrates marketing campaigns. He works with architects on remodeling plans. And he dreams up and helps his staff construct the whimsical window displays in the company's Seattle and Portland stores.
Jana Scopis fell in love with event planning while she was in college. As a hotel management major at Central Washington University, she scooped up an internship in the catering department of a historic hotel in Texas, where she helped plan swanky weddings and plush parties. She spent the next decade working her way up the hotel-catering food chain, and in March of 2007, she became the director of catering and convention services at the W Seattle>, a position that involves selling, schmoozing, keeping dozens of balls in the air and planning some of Seattle's most lavish parties.
Like many English majors, Laura Vanderpool found gainful employment working in corporate communications. During her six-year tenure in the marketing division of a Big Five accounting firm, the University of Washington alum cut her teeth writing "dry proposals and reports." When a corporate restructuring prompted her to jump ship in 2000, she landed in public relations, first at a doomed dot-com, then at socially progressive Parsons Public Relations in Seattle. In 2004 she became senior account manager of the nine-person, three-canine PR team, a job that entails acting as the agency's lead writer and helping environmentally conscious clients spread the word about their products and services.
Roberta Browne grew up on what she refers to as "a steady diet of Looney Tunes cartoons and 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'" All her spare time in high school was spent drawing cartoon characters, and all her notebooks were covered with doodles. After getting a commercial illustration degree at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, she tried her hand at freelance illustration for two years – and wound up earning the bulk of her income by waitressing and bartending. Feeling off her game, she returned to school for animation and, upon graduating, landed her first job as an animator. A decade later, in May of 2007, Browne joined Bungie Studios in Kirkland, where she works as a lead animator, a job that involves everything from 3-D software to brainstorming sessions to pratfalls.
Robert Margoshes spent his twenties performing in rock bands. But an opportunity to work as a roadie for a headlining act made him realize he preferred working behind the scenes to playing on stage. After spending more than a decade on the road as a lighting technician for what he calls "giant corporate rock shows," he put down roots in Seattle. Today he works as technical director of the historic Moore Theatre, ensuring that the lighting, sound and special effects of each performance go off without a hitch.
Like many animal-loving kids, Jamie Pflughoeft grew up with dogs, cats, and birds for pets and dreamed of working with animals someday. In college, she studied animal behavior while working as a pet sitter and dog walker on the side. Today, as top dog of Cowbelly Pet Photography, she snaps the mugs of hundreds of critters a year, turning many of them into brightly colored, digitally enhanced artwork that she's dubbed Decopaw.
Robert Holland caught the baking bug at an early age. As a fresh-faced teen, he landed a job making bread by hand at the family-run Sanchioli Brothers Bakery in Pittsburgh, Pa., an 85-year-old cornerstone of the city's Little Italy district. Today he's head baker at the wholesale location of Seattle's Grand Central Bakery, where he manages the production of thousands of artisan breads each day, overseeing a staff of two dozen who shape each loaf by hand.
Sports buff Ryan Madayag grew up watching Mariners and Seahawks games at the Kingdome. As a teen, he played running back for the Inglemoor High School Vikings, where he broke the school's rushing record. In 2003, the University of Washington communications graduate scored even bigger, landing an internship in the Seattle Seahawks' Fan Development Department.
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