A day: Every day is surprising and dynamic, says Roxana Sirghie (Mobile Works)

Roxana Sirghie is Account Manager at Mobile Works, the agency she describes as “a friendly and ridiculously passionate full-service mobile agency”. She shared her day at work with AdHugger, so we’re going to let her words say how it is.

Hi, I’m Roxana (they call me in a million ways: Rox, Roxi Foxi and so on). I’m an Account Manager at MobileWorks, a friendly and ridiculously passionate full-service mobile agency, part of Lowe Group Romania. We have the geeks for awesome development and the gorgeous girls for answering our customer’s questions.

I would like to tell you what a day of my life looks like, although it will be kind of difficult to summarize and to find a pattern, because every day is surprising and dynamic.

Let’s start with the beginning: I wake up every day at 7:30 and as soon as I open my eyes, tasks and ideas start flying through my mind. I try telling them to stop, but there’s no way they let me enjoy a few moments of silence. 🙂

Then, of course, I have to get dressed. Every day starts inevitably the same way: today I’m wearing sneakers! Aaaand I end up wearing high heels most of the times, because I have that customer meeting scheduled at 2 PM, I simply can’t wear sneakers today!

I’m having breakfast on the run and I’m petting my cat, Harley (yes, he’s named after Harley Davidson, he purrs so loud that I sometimes need to wear ear plugs 🙂 ). Then I’m getting into my car and I’m ready to go. After about 45 minutes, I’m already in the office, and on the way I’ve already sent 3 e-mails and answered 2 phone calls.

In the office, my colleagues are waiting for me. If there are no urgent requests, we make time for a coffee on our balcony on the second floor. You may call it our small sanctuary, we gather here for almost every group activity: brainstorming, small meetings, eating, talking and having coffee. So, for 10 minutes, we all gather with a hot cup of coffee in our hands and we talk about what’s new, what we dreamed about last night, what happened in the last few hours while we were away and so on.

And then, the fun begins. 🙂 Each day is made of many many many e-mails, phone calls, decisions, proposals, negotiations, price offers, learning, teaching and many others. A job as a client service is a full time job – and what I mean by full time job is 24/7 availability. You always have to be there, at any time, any hour and any day. Being an account manager represents, in my opinion, an interesting and complex set of skills.

On top of understanding what marketing and communication is all about, I believe you have to be: A bit of a project manager, to communicate efficiently with the actual project manager. A bit of a programmer and designer, to understand what the development team and the designers are delivering. A communications specialist, to make sure all the information arrives quickly and clear to its destination. A bit of a supreme master of equilibrium, to maintain the peace and love between the agency, the development team and the client. Oh well, this last skill is probably the most difficult of them all. It’s not hard to imagine what happens when you’ve just received a project which needed to be ready yesterday. Suddenly, there’s a lot of action going on, for both sides, so the account manager has to do everything in its powers to maintain the serenity and complete the project successfully, in time. I suppose the best alias for an account manager is “the pacifier”.

On a more serious note, I really think this job suits me perfectly, because I’m the kind of person that appreciates promptitude, quality services and I always approach each task as I would be doing it for myself. Therefore, I offer my clients the exact things I appreciate.

The day goes by in no time – now it’s 9 o’clock and I’m organizing my agenda for the day, prioritizing my tasks and attending meetings, and in the blink of an eye it’s already 17 o’clock and the day is still young. One thing is sure: you always know when your work day begins, but you never know when it’s going to end.

The time passes by so fast because we create wonderful experiences for our customers, starting from special projects like the 3 metres high Beck’s bottle we installed at University Square, part of the Beck’s Augmented Street Art project, and continuing with pro bono projects like the First Aid app (Prim Ajutor), developed for the Romanian Red Cross. For each of our projects we invest our full attention and we work together with our creative and development team to find the best solutions.

By far, the best moments are those when you find out one of your projects was nominated and actually won an award in a mobile competition. That’s the time when you realize all the stress, the tiredness, the late nights in the office and the short deadlines are worth it.

It’s that moment when you feel pure joy, hard to describe, which takes over your entire body and spreads to the entire team. You get on the stage, feel the spotlights, tremble a bit, and then receive the mighty award. You search for the best words, short and comprehensive, you thank everyone who worked so hard for this project, you thank the client, your family and you thank God for having this amazing opportunity. Then you go back to your seat and feel the rush: your team just won a prize and that’s awesome!

That being said, I suppose now you have a better picture of what being an account at Mobile Works means. It occupies the most of my time, but it’s so challenging and thrilling and exciting and amazing that you just have to say “challenge accepted” and go with the flow. Someone once told me “Time flies when you’re having fun”… It really does fly and I’m enjoying every second of it!

Mobile Works is the first mobile marketing agency in Romania, part of a communication group, (Lowe Romania) and the only one with it’s own technology lab.