ArcStone Spotlight: Joli Skow

Title: Internet Marketing Manager

Start date: December 2011

Path to ArcStone. I had an internship at Points North in the summer of 2010 when I was finishing college in Duluth, and after that I worked at a company called 50 Below where I worked on websites for our clients. I did quality assurance, so on a daily basis, I would click on different parts of the sites we built to make sure they worked properly.

Lois Lane in a marketer’s world. I am an English major and have a minor in journalism from the University of Minnesota in Duluth. My internship with Points North was a marketing internship, which I got because they wanted somebody who could write, which is why they hired an English major instead of a marketing major.

While I was at Points North, we needed a new website. Our CEO asked Christopher Swanson, the CEO of PureDriven, a digital agency in Two Harbors, to come talk to us about designing a new website. During his spiel, he said “When we’re designing your website, we have to think about SEO. This is what SEO is; it’s very important.”

As he was explaining it I was falling in love with it! It was probably one of the coolest things I had ever heard, and I wanted to learn more about it. I set out to start learning more on my own, so that I could eventually get a job doing it. Now, here I am at ArcStone, doing what I enjoy!

Professional strengths. Content marketing is probably one of my favorite things, because I love when I write something for a client, and I go into Google Analytics and see that visitors spent a bunch of time reading it or interacting with it. It makes me excited when something I made creates traffic. That gets me going.

Loving life on wheels. I love riding my bike to work and just being outside and enjoying the exercise aspect of it. Everybody on the Greenway, in general, is happy, and I like being around happy people.

All signs point north. My absolute favorite place to have lunch and decompress is by the lake in Duluth. During my internship when the weather was nice, I would pack my lunch and take it out to a bench on Lake Superior. I ate my lunch with the lighthouses in the distance and the lake gently lapping and the sun shining on me. It was zen; my husband and I already have plans to retire there.

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. I came from the small town of Baldwin, Wisconsin; maybe that’s why I love Duluth so much. Things are a lot slower in smaller towns. The first thing I noticed when I moved to the Cities was everybody needs to be somewhere right now. It’s go, go, go. People don’t look at you and say hello when you’re passing on the street. Growing up in Baldwin, I could bike across town and know people on the street and they knew who I was.

First job. My first job was at a gas station deli, making pizzas and taquitos on the roller grill and stocking the freezer. After six months, I moved from deli to cashier, so I got to work in the front instead. I learned a lot from working in service, but the biggest thing I took away from it is that life isn’t always about doing what you want.

I did enjoy it, though. I started opening the store the next summer, and while getting up at 4:30 am was no fun, I liked driving in and opening up the store and brewing the coffee. The retired crowd would come in, buy their donuts and coffee, and sit in the deli. They would talk about the local gossip, like “Oh, did you hear? Eleanor’s doing this.” I enjoyed that.