What’s it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky’s Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.
Evan Lugo, 30, Account Strategy Executive at Rise Interactive
Rise is a full-service digital marketing agency. We specialize in three core areas: media, or any way to drive traffic, whether that’s paid search, programmatic, SEO, email, social, you name it; customer experience, which includes creative design and web and mobile development; and analytics. Those are the three we focus on, with data as our backbone.
A lot of times, companies understand they have this massive amount of data, but they really don’t know how to aggregate it all and pull insights from it. That’s where Rise comes in, being able to not only source data from multiple areas but really tell a story from that and give the brands we work with actionable steps.
We work with Fortune 500 brands across the country in verticals like health care, education, retail, finance, B2B, CPG (consumer packaged goods). We have a wide variety of clients, like Ulta Beauty, Atkins Nutritionals and NorthShore University HealthSystem.
This is where I work, right here at this desk: It’s clean, or boring, whichever way you want to look at it. I have a little bit of decoration. That’s a picture of Rihanna and Drake drawn for me by my old team because I like Drake. It’s very close to my heart.
On the account strategy team, overall, our goal is to work with our clients to develop long-term strategy for growth. My job is really to understand not only the goals and challenges of the client but also the ecosystem they play in, and act as an internal ambassador on the Rise side for them.
We’re close to 230 employees at this point. Almost all of us are in the Chicago location under one roof. We’ve done that purposely because we think whenever everyone is here working together, there’s a lot more synergy, and the communication is way more seamless. You have to be nice to each other. You can’t be a jerk.
I was born and raised here in the Chicago, on the West Side, on a street called Natchez. When I was 13, I moved to a northwest suburb called Crystal Lake. So I grew up there until I went to college at Northern Illinois University. I studied marketing.
In college, I interned for Northwestern Mutual, and after I graduated, I continued working for Northwestern Mutual, where I cut my teeth as an investments and insurance adviser. It was cool because I was learning how to run your own business and running meetings and doing the subsequent strategy. I was at Northwestern Mutual for about three years, and then I went to a smaller firm, The Heartland Group.
All together, it was close to six years in financial services. And that’s when I felt like it was getting stale for me, and I wanted to try something new.
Rise was forming the business development team, the digital strategy team, and they wanted people to come in and start building relationships in the financial services and health-care space. And I could speak that language. I had my health insurance and life insurance licenses, so they thought I would be a good fit. I’ve been here about a year and 10 months.
People here are brilliant, entrepreneurial and very innovative. What it takes to be a Riser is someone who’s hungry but humble at the same time.
Rise has a basketball team, the Rise 5. We play in a league together. It’s made up of eight guys. We have five questions that we always ask our clients, and they’re called the Rise 5, so that’s where we got the name. Our record is 0-3. I really didn’t want to touch that subject.
We have a euchre league. We have Beer Fridays every Friday at 3pm.
We have a Peanut Butter loan repayment program that’s awesome. Rise decided to help out by contributing $50 per month toward our student loans.
We have a cool group that’s been meeting, Women on the Rise. It talks about issues everybody can learn from, like delivering bad news or how to set up meetings and run them efficiently. I’ve been to one of the women’s meetings; it was very inclusive.
I really love all the people I work with, and I want to help them grow.
As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.
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