Our work isn’t always easy, but it’s rewarding, and every day we see the difference we make for our clients. How We Started After an 18-year career in broadcast television, I was exhausted. I was working around the clock, and I was a mom to three young kids during a time when my husband’s work took him across the globe. I wanted to reprioritize my career and my life and give myself more time with my family. And I wanted to continue to find ways to do meaningful work for my community. During my time in broadcast, I gravitated toward stories that came from our communities, stories that uplifted and inspired, and stories about organizations that were making a difference in the lives of others. When I made the decision to step away from my career in broadcast television, my biggest fear was that I was leaving a perfectly good job with stability and benefits. But I knew that I could do something bigger; something that would marry my love for storytelling with my entrepreneurial spirit, which comes from my grandfather. He was an entrepreneur in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite my grandmother’s warnings, he opened his own tailor shop in Brooklyn. My grandmother was afraid for him. She was afraid for his safety and that others wouldn’t want to pay him for his work. A brilliant tailor, he persisted, and he was rewarded with loyal customers who came from all over New York’s boroughs and from neighboring states for his services. He owned his shop for 23 years, but the commute from Queens to Brooklyn was daunting, so eventually he closed his business and went back to work in a local shop, sharing his talent with new customers. My grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit lived on in me, so in 2004, despite my fears, I bet on myself, took a leap of faith and registered my business, the Gomez Howard Group. The first years of owning my own business weren’t always easy, and I needed to learn how to assign a monetary value to my unique set of skills
Howard family volunteering on Christmas Eve at the Food Bank of the Rockies. (Photo: Gomez Howard Group)
and the time it would take me to do the work. That can be challenging for new entrepreneurs. It can also be difficult to navigate the administrative demands of a new business—accounting, bookkeeping and finance, to name a few. I was fortunate to have my husband Jeff, whose unwavering support made the early years easier to find my way. He was my biggest supporter and, over time, joined me in the business, and worked with me for nearly a decade. Jeff’s experience in media, corporate communications, and audience engagement—coupled with his business acumen—helped us scale the business and our team. In the last 20 years, we’ve grown to a team of nine, and we’ve adapted to expand the services we provide to our clients. Our team members’ decades of experience and expertise— coupled with their empathy, compassion, and authenticity—have helped us establish trust with our roster of more than a dozen clients, who trust us to share their stories with our communities. Many of our clients have been with us for more than a decade. Others engage us for shorter contracts, generally to help them create systems that better connect with their audiences or help to navigate a challenging situation.
21 The Acumen
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