The MAD in Mad Skills
Hi. I’m Mary, and Mad Skills Digital Media is my (very) small digital marketing business.
Let’s back up a little. In March of 2020, I was in Los Angeles for my last semester of college, interning at a small production company and taking my final film production classes through an off-campus study program. It was tough being so far from my family and friends and my home campus of Huntington University, but I was getting through it. Actually, I was doing pretty well. I was nailing my classes and learning a lot from my internship, and well on my way to finishing my first feature-length screenplay.
That being said…
On March 11th, 2020, I specifically remember having a pretty rough day. I was exhausted from a weekend of shooting a student project, I was (unfairly) beating myself up over a mistake I had made for an assignment at my internship, and to top it all off, the new shoes I was wearing were cutting into my ankles and had drawn blood. After a long bus ride back to my apartment, I changed into my swimsuit and spent the evening in the hot tub relaxing with friends, looking a little silly with my feet sticking up in the air so as not to boil my tender ankles. After successfully de-stressing, when my head hit the pillow that night, my inner monologue said, “Don’t worry Mary. Tomorrow is an easy day. No internship and no classes. Nothing is going to happen in the next 24 hours that is going to upset you.”
Unfortunately, on March 12th, the world went mad. The off-campus program was shut down. I had three days to clear out of my apartment. My home campus was closing and graduation indefinitely postponed. I stayed with my cousin who lived just outside L.A. for a week to see what the damage was. When it became apparent that it was only going to get worse, my cousin and I agreed that, if I was going to be stuck somewhere, I was better off stuck at home. I left LA the morning after the first lockdown order was issued.
My class at the Los Angeles Film Studies Center the day everything was shut down. We orchestrated a last minute class photo when we realized that we wouldn’t be together at the end of the semester.
I finished my internship remotely. I finished my schooling online. I submitted my last ever college assignment (the aforementioned feature-length screenplay) sitting alone in my room in the middle of the night some weeks later. I watched my senior film festival from my couch. In the late summer of 2020, I attended a downscaled college graduation ceremony. Going to LA was meant to be an experiment to collect data to determine if LA was where I wanted to go to work in the film industry. When I came home and started asking what to do next, I realized that the data was inconclusive, and since the film industry was collapsing, going back to LA wasn’t an option anyway.
I hadn’t seen most of my friends since leaving for LA in January, and our graduation ceremony was pushed back to August, 2020.
Shortly after I got home from LA, my Aunt Kathy reached out to me about helping her take her business online. Kathy is the owner of Corazón Sterling, a small jewelry business that imports jewelry from Taxco, Mexico. Her business up to that point was mostly reliant on traveling across the country and selling jewelry at trade shows and events, which were no longer happening because of COVID. I started with product photography, then moved into website development, then social media management. As I sharpened my skills, I started branching out and finding other clients.
My official business “start date” is May of 2023, but that’s just the date when I filed the slightly scary paperwork to become an LLC. I was essentially a freelancer for a couple years before that. The slightly ironic thing is that I actually started doing this back in college. I managed a small, student-run production company on the Huntington campus for a few semesters, which involved prepping contracts and bids, working with small businesses and non-profit programs, coordinating with student freelancers, and acting as a video freelancer myself. At the time, it hadn’t really occurred to me to start my own business. Even when I pitched my own production company to fill a corporate media class requirement, it still hadn’t occurred to me that I would actually do it. It’s not so much that I doubted myself, but more that I never thought that the right doors would open, but somehow they did.
I’m still left with some butterflies (I probably am starting a small business at the worst possible time to start a small business, economically speaking), and a small part of me will always wonder what could’ve been in Los Angeles, but now that I have finally committed to this business, I can’t wait to get started. I know there are long days and uncertain times ahead, but hey, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
This blog post was written by a real person, not an AI bot.