Meet Our Marketing Team

For the next installment in our “Meet Our…” series, I’d like to introduce you to Zen Planner’s Marketing team. These women are smart, driven and hilarious. Read on to find out about their fitness passions, the ‘basic’ nature of their Fall beverage preferences and their odd penchant for wardrobe malfunctions. (Editor’s note: this interview was recorded in August.)

Who are you and what do you do here?

KW: I’m Kinnick Wheaton and I lead our marketing team. I’ve been here for two and a half years now. I’ve worked with Zen Planner before; Zen Planner was my client at the first agency I worked for. I met (CEO) Jeff Gardner a long time ago, and some of the original founders, and fell in love with Zen Planner and always wanted to come back. After working agency-side for a while, they had a position available.

KM: I am Kelly McEvitt; I’ve been here for eight months and I primarily work on our social media channels, our testing strategy and our HubSpot management. I have loved working here so far; I just love how fitness-focused everyone is and it really… It’s good peer pressure. Healthy peer pressure.

KM: Yeah, it makes you really fitness-focused and I love it.

TH: My name is Tiffany Houkom and I do all of our search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Basically, I help our site get discovered on Google. I’m also in charge of content development, so rewriting content on our website, blog posts, e-books – anything to get (potential customers) onto our site and interested in Zen Planner so that the sales team can reach out to them. I’m kind of like Kinnick; I worked with her at that agency, and was interested in moving over to the client-side. I’d always looked at Zen Planner’s website and thought “Wow it looks so cool to work there!” It’ll be two years in December.

Kelly, what did you do before you got here?

KM: I did social media in-house for a large website in Denver’s Tech Center. Then I was at a smaller boutique agency after that, in social media.

What do you like to do outside of the office? How do you like to sweat?

TH: I love doing CrossFit®. Recently I’ve been doing spin classes and I really like those as well. I love hiking, going to breweries, going to concerts, and in the winter, snowboarding. And rollerblading! I just bought rollerblades and that has changed my life. I love rollerblading!

KM: I also like hiking; I just climbed Mount Sherman yesterday, and I have loved swimming my entire life and am getting back into it. I’ve been testing out the CrossFit® waters recently and testing out other boutique fitness places in Denver.

KW: Outside of here I love to cook! I have a huge passion for food. I’m not terrible, either. I say that because it would suck if I really loved doing something that I wasn’t any good at. I love (my dog) Harvey, and for the next year of my life, I’m going to love wedding planning. I’ll figure that out soon. I’ve got a lot of gym memberships. I like to mix it up. I’ve done everything from yoga to CrossFit® to Pilates and circuit training and all sorts of things. I like to find what’s new and dedicate my time for six months or a year until I get good. CrossFit® it was 3 years. I keep it mixed up. I’m a big fan of all of our different verticals. I’m pretty basic. I bought a chai beer and a pumpkin beer this weekend.

TH: To me, August is just a waste of time to get to September. I’m like, “Let’s just get through this, we all want football and beer.”

KW: I love football and I’m the commissioner of my fantasy team. And I won the first year I did it.

TH: I love football. Broncos and, even though they’re terrible, the (University of Colorado) Buffaloes.

KW: Oh, and we’re all Colorado natives! That’s a fun fact about the marketing team.

KM: And we have common friends outside of work. Super random!

I think in this office, the women are bigger football fans than the men, in general. There are more of us who love football. I’m a die-hard fan, and the dudes are like, Well I sort of follow a team but I don’t really care.

TH: Broncos game, dressing up, it was all the girls.

This is the right office for us to be in.

KM: There’s something about just sitting on the couch on a Sunday and devoting hours to watching football.
TH: Eating delicious, awful food, and drinking and eating everything pumpkin.
(Laughter)

What do you order at Starbucks?

KM: We’re all pretty similar right now.

KW: Yeah, it just depends on what our kick is. I’m big into their cold brew but my bigger go-to has been Venti iced water with three scoops of matcha, done and done.

KM: I like cold brew coffee with a little cream.

TH: Just plain cold brew. But not too much. I almost killed myself a couple of times. I made cold brew at home and didn’t dilute it, and I was feeling really sweaty and crazy and I found out that I’d essentially drank like four pots of coffee. I had to lie down. I will get a pumpkin spice latte or two in the fall. They’re kind of too sweet, but I have to do it a couple of times.

KW: I don’t do pumpkin coffee! That’s the one pumpkin I don’t do. I’ll put pumpkin in chai but for whatever reason I can’t do the coffee.

TH: We need to do pumpkin beer exchange!

KM: That’s an annual thing now.

What’s your most embarrassing moment?

KW: God, everything. Like this week? I’m a pretty awkward person.

TH: Kelly swallowed a quarter.

KW: What were you doing with money in your mouth as an adult?!

KM: Three words: College drinking game. And to be fair, the guy next to me did the exact same thing!

TH: In college, there was a bar in Boulder called Shooters and they had a mechanical bull, and that was where we ended the night. Everyone stands around the mechanical bull, and it was my favorite thing to do – I loved riding it. And one night, I ran and jumped on it, and when I landed, my jeans split from here to my knee, just like wide open. And everyone got silent, like in the movies when something awkward happens and the music stops. I had to walk home with my pants like flapping around. It was horrible!

KW: I don’t know why I’m still embarrassed because this happened in elementary school, but we had this huge homemade log snake thing, and you’d get on it like a teeter-totter, so of course there were screws sticking out and it was really unsafe. I had my black stirrup leggings on and I got caught on one of those big screws and it ripped my leggings right off of me. We tried safety pinning them all together on the playground and it didn’t work so I had to go to the office and wear lost-and-found sweatpants. It was my first truly embarrassing moment, which is why I remember it now – that was what embarrassment felt like and I first felt it on that day. Losing your favorite clothes, social criticism, exposure – the whole nine yards.

You’re going out this Friday night. Where will you have dinner beforehand, what movie will you see, and what will you bring with you into the movie?

KM: I would go to Avanti (here in Denver) for dinner. I want to see Bad Moms, and I wouldn’t sneak anything in, but popcorn is pretty delicious, so that would be my snack.

TH: I would want Mexican food, and I’d get chile rellenos and tamales. I want to see Ghostbusters again, and I’d bring in dark chocolate Justin’s peanut butter cups.

KW: I would not go out to dinner – I’d cook something at home – and I would probably…gosh, if we go to the movies it’s to see something that’s better on a big screen, so something 3D super action-packed with lots of CGI. What am I sneaking in? Let’s be real, I’m probably going to bring in some wine.