My focus this month was to create and present a strategy and evaluation of the current state of marketing operations. Despite the task at hand, this month held the additional challenge of out of site commitments and holidays of different team members.
By now I’ve become used to the daily operations and I learned to effortlessly switch between hosting and marketing tasks. Thanks to the support of my peers during the last months I was able to lead together with another colleague all the events that normally would have been led by other team members.

At this point I feel confident creating, organizing and leading different events in the coliving
world, while running regular operations in parallel. Those events have again pushed me
more to rethink my original business idea and start working on another project. Even though this project is not as closely related to the co-living world per se, it would allow me to implement my marketing and creativity skills, as well as the knowledge and competencies that I’ve picked up during my time here.

As for the marketing presentation the biggest challenge was not only to bring together, select and summarize all the data, but to translate the conclusions into a digestible form and link it to practical actions.

Since we are working in a small team and responsibilities sometimes can spill over from one person to the other, a big part of the presentation was taking part before it officially
happened. I had to communicate with and feel out the needs of the business owner, to not
present a result that is disconnected from the usefulness for the business. In a second step
we used a few of the weekly team meetings to check how aligned the team is in terms of
vision, mission and goals of the business. We used those meetings to also share implicit
knowledge or data points that might go unseen. As we were approaching the presentation
day I made sure to check in with the manager, with the team members separate and in team meetings about the message of the strategy, potentially critical points and also a few of the conclusions. The goal from my side was to avoid controversies and intransparency. The presentation contained criticism, that as long as it is seen in a business context can be
helpful. On the other hand it might be interpreted as criticism of the team or a particular
person not doing their job sufficiently right. Both of those aspects needed to be avoid, to
present a holistic and realistic evaluation of the current state of marketing.
The presentation itself went well. It contained many critical but productive debates, allowing team members, management and the owner to exchange views openly and explain their perspective and intentions. The results of this presentation and meeting will be used to develop a marketing manual and a content creation cheat sheet. The presentation also revealed the value of multiple data points, that up until now have partly gone unseen.