MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: MEREDITH McCREIGHT
/Studio IX:
Meredith, good morning. How are you?
Meredith McCreight:
I'm doing pretty well.
Studio IX:
Big question these days.
MM:
It is. It's weird times.
Studio IX:
Everybody in your circles doing well?
MM:
Everybody's good, yeah. Healthy. Safe.
And you?
Studio IX:
Yes. Feeling very grateful.
MM:
Me too. It's really nice to be in Charlottesville where things haven't been so bad. I’m grateful to be able to come here to Studio IX and to see friends in outdoor backyard settings. I feel for my friends who are in cities where you just can't do that. I just moved back to Charlottesville in February.
Studio IX:
Where were you before?
MM:
Boston.
Studio IX:
Did you like it?
MM:
I did! I liked a lot of things about it. I think the biggest thing that was lacking for me though was that I didn't feel a great sense of community there. Because it's just so spread out, it didn't feel like home. I just didn't feel like I had a real place there.
Studio IX:
But you feel that here.
MM:
For sure.
Studio IX:
Could you tell us a bit about what you do?
MM:
Oh gosh. Yeah. I have trouble explaining what I do because I feel like it changes and morphs so quickly. I started my business (Create Without Bounds) a little over two years ago. It really kind of started out of a place of reactivity. I had just left a job that I was very unhappy at and I did it without a plan, so the first few months of my business were really me just kind of taking any freelance design work I could get and that worked out really well at first. I didn't have any picture in my mind of what I wanted my business to be but it gradually evolved into the business it is today, which is helping women who are solo entrepreneurs, who own their own small businesses, and who help other people or important causes through their services. I work with them on branding, design, and web development.
Studio IX:
That’s great. What were you doing before that?
MM:
I worked in design for a long time. I was working at an agency in 2008 in Phoenix but I wasn't really doing design at that point. I was trying to get into the creative department at the agency, so I took a job in business development to get my foot in the door. But it was 2008, so after only a few months there, I got laid off along with ya know, everyone else. I started waiting tables at a wine bar, which I actually really loved, and I also got a part time job as a graphic artist at a print shop. It was this little tiny shop, but it was probably the best job I've ever had because I learned so much. My creative director had come from this huge magazine publishing world and was such a great designer. He taught me about design principles and best practices and just went above and beyond to mentor me.
From there I went into design and web development, and always a little bit of marketing in there. I was always doing social media stuff, email campaigns, copywriting. I worked for the Arizona Humane Society for a while and we had an account with a company called Blackbaud, which services nonprofits. They helped us with our donor database management and integration with our website. Our account rep from there kind of poached me and got me to come work for Blackbaud.
They're headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, so I bounced yet again. That was unique job because I got to be half visual designer and half web developer. I got to use my creative brain and my coding/ logical brain.
As a side hustle, I had been helping a friend who started her own agency with design and web dev work, just a few hours a week, and it had scaled up to where I was doing 20-30 hours a week for her on top of my job. And I was like, "Do you think this is legitimately something I could do full time, if I quit my job?" And she said, "Yeah, we have enough work and I can get more!"
So after two years at Blackbaud, I quit and started working for her pretty much full time. There wasn’t much keeping me in Charleston at that point and I was ready for my next adventure, so I moved up to Boston where I had some friends and often visited.
After a couple of years working with that friend, her life was changing a lot. She had gotten back together with an old boyfriend and things were moving very quickly. She moved out to San Francisco to be with him and they were going to get married and start a family, and she just wanted to scale her business back and not be working so much. That obviously is awesome and I couldn’t have been happier for her, but clear wasn't a fit for me. I needed to make money living in Boston!
I ended up going back into the corporate world and took a job as a Design Director at a big marketing technology research firm. The first six months, I really liked it. I felt challenged in new ways. But after awhile, I just realized I never ever want to work for anyone else ever again. I don't know if that is just part of being in your mid to late 30s and just having a realization that you no longer want to spend your time and energy on something that doesn't serve your passion and light you up, or if it was just that place, but I just couldn't do it anymore.
Studio IX:
What are you passionate about?
MM:
As far as work goes, I just really enjoy helping other people. I love seeing a transformation in someone and seeing them be able to overcome something that they didn't think was possible.
There is a coaching arm of my business. A lot of that is helping people remove self-limiting beliefs and get out of their own way. Change the narrative in their heads so that they can accomplish more than they thought they could.
Studio IX:
That seems quite helpful at this moment. So many of us are thinking about matters a lot more deeply, about what we actually want to be doing and how to get there.
MM:
There's definitely a lot of fear right now, too. I believe that fear is always the reason that we make decisions that are not good for us, on some level, but I think now it's especially pervasive in the sense that people think, “If I’m going to take a leap and do something different with my career and my life, well now it's definitely not the time,” so they're slamming on the brakes. Although some people are doing the opposite which I think is really cool and so brave. But I do think it's scary for them still.
Studio IX:
Is the coaching piece something that just emerged or did you have past experience with it?
MM:
While I was at my corporate job seeking other ways to be happy without leaving (because it did pay very well so it was hard to convince myself to leave), I started taking a coach training program. It wasn’t really my intention to practice as a coach, it was really more to just learn about myself and be a better listener, be a better communicator, be able to hold space for people and just understand a little bit more about my own strengths and how to leverage those.
I'm a certified life coach. I didn't think I necessarily wanted to do something with it, but I just realized that in working with my design clients, coaching is just a natural part of it anyway. It definitely helps guide those conversations.
There's an art of selling—your product, but also selling an idea. It’s really just getting someone to come along with you on the journey of what life can look like for them. They will come to the conclusion on their own if you hold space for them and ask the right questions. I was terrified of promoting and selling my services before, and I never would have gained this skill had I not gone through coach training.
Studio IX:
Is there a particular client or story that stands out to you in your memory?
MM:
Let's see. I think probably the client that had the biggest transition was oddly a coaching-only client. I didn't do any design work for her or web development. She is an artist, she used to live in Manhattan and would be in shows all the time. She was commissioned to do sculptures and she was taking classes, teaching classes… just really active in her community and feeling like she was living in her passion every day. She's married and has two older boys that she adopted a long time ago, but she and her husband had a new baby and everything just kind of went full stop. Obviously, there's a lot of amazing things that came along with that. She got to spend a ton of time with her son and they got to grow their family, but her artwork just fell completely away from her… she felt like she really lost that.
I met her four years later. She was just desperate to figure out a way to get back into some sort of routine where she was painting and just flexing that creative muscle again. She had some pretty ambitious goals. I typically book my clients in three months so we can track progress. She wanted to finish a series of 20 paintings in our three months together.
Studio IX:
That's ambitious.
MM:
Yeah! She wanted to do 20 paintings in a series. She also wanted to publish a children's book that she had an idea for, and she wanted to apply to grad school. She applied to grad school, she finished the book, and she finished 60 paintings in three months!
Studio IX:
Wow.
MM:
I know! I think the coolest thing was watching her body language and the words that she used to talk about herself in the beginning had drastically changed. She was so much more confident. She held herself highly. She was really proud of herself. She didn't get into one of the grad schools that she wanted to get into and that didn't crush her like she thought it would. She was like, "I'm okay. That just isn't the school for me." It was just very cool to see that transformation.
Studio IX:
Absolutely. How has the pandemic impacted things?
MM:
I think there've been some dark moments. There've been some low points for sure. I think COVID coinciding with a move, a giant life change, definitely made things a little bit more complex, but it also showed me that I have a lot to be grateful for. I was really, really glad to be closer to my family and be here with my parents and be able to keep an eye on them because they're older and not always taking the best care of themselves. Making sure they eat right and are safe.
From a business perspective, I had wrapped up a lot of projects right before moving here and I hadn't really gone after more projects to put in the queue necessarily. It was just a giant pause button in my life. But I do think that a lot of good came out of that, too. My business seems to always be evolving, not who I'm serving, but how I'm serving them and coming up with different ways to do that more effectively and impact more people.
This time has really given me some clarity that I want to have an education arm of my business, where I'm offering courses and self-serve information and guidance to people. If I create something once, and can just teach it once but reach more than one person, why wouldn’t I do that? That clarity has been a giant light bulb, and a relief really. I'm excited about it. I haven't seen the fruits of that idea yet, but I am excited about it!
Studio IX:
Have your clients needs changed? What’s the general tone, in light of everything?
MM:
That's an interesting question. I have several recurring clients. It's been interesting because two of them in particular seem more fired up than ever, like this is the time where they need to be there to support people, which is just super cool to be a part of. But I do think there's this sense of urgency to get stuff out there while people are still in this place of need, as if they won't still need those things when things go back to normal.
Studio IX:
How has it been being in here at Studio IX? Has it been helpful?
MM:
I don't think I was here long enough before COVID to really see any results of that. But I do know that coming back here, I just feel like a human again. I feel like an adult again, getting out of the house and just having a routine, taking a shower in the morning, putting on not-yoga-clothes. It has been really, really good for my mental health.
Studio IX:
That’s great to hear.
Thanks so much Meredith. Appreciate you taking the time.
MM:
My pleasure.. Thank you.