Paris Saturday, Cubicle Monday: An Unexpected Master Class
Like Renoir or the host of a glow party, allow me to paint a picture of my typical Friday for the better part of a decade.
Five o'clock: Close the laptop on whatever policy initiative, legislative briefing, or communications crisis had occupied the week.
Six o'clock: Home and repacking the same bag I'd just unpacked on Monday.
Seven o'clock: Airport to catch a flight to Boston or Seattle or Los Angeles or Paris.
Because on Saturday, I had a different job entirely — and it was much louder.
Just prior to turning 30, I started an event production company rooted in punk and alternative culture. Not because it was a calculated career move, but because it was the opposite of one — a creative outlet that had absolutely nothing to do with government policy or interagency coordination, and that was entirely the point.
At first.
The business grew. The clients got bigger. What started as an idea to be a part of a stylish Philly indie music scene evolved into large-scale creative production work for companies whose names you'd recognize, and a client roster that included, at various points, celebrity chefs, film directors, and people with enough cultural cachet that they would have scoffed if they had seen the Scarlet G (for government) on my shirt indicating I was also a proud civil servant.
And through all of it, I was always back in Jersey on Monday morning to do my part as the responsible government communications guy. Sitting in meetings to “maximize cross-division operational alignment for improved service delivery.”
And that I did.
Nobody knew. At least not the scale of it. And honestly? I didn't mind.
There's something quietly enjoyable about a certain kind of duality — the mild-mannered bureaucrat during the typical 9-to-5 is also the one pulling off productions in 18th century castles on weekends for celebrities with more houses than our office had working printers. I liked having the two worlds. Creative events made me sharp in ways the day job couldn't, and public service kept me humble in ways the weekend hustle wouldn't.
But here's where the story turns from fond nostalgia to practical business acumen.
By the end of its run, I had a post-graduate-level education in high-stakes operations, execution, and what it actually takes to build something that works.
Running a production company from scratch — building it out of nothing but ambition, strategic team building, and that high you get from self-imposed logistical complexity — teaches you things about operations that standard institutions simply cannot.
Our company motto was "defy the mainstream" — which sounded like a punk ethos and was, in practice, something more useful than that. What it really meant was this: look at every situation from the counter angle. Don't accept the obvious approach just because it's the obvious approach. Ask what everyone else is ignoring and build from there.
That instinct — applied to every venture — meant we tried things that either worked or visibly didn't, and we found out fast. No hiding behind process. No blame diffusion across a committee or consultant. It worked or it didn't, and you knew by end of night. So you better make damn sure it works.
Twenty years in government taught me how rare that standard is. In large institutions, nobody gets an immediate bill for a bad decision. The costs show up later, somewhere else, paid by someone who had nothing to do with it. That distance makes it easy — comfortable, even — to mistake activity for progress and process for results. "Defy the mainstream" isn't a natural operating principle for a state agency — but it probably should be. Pending the appropriate approvals and signatures, of course.
But the turntables — metaphorically speaking — spun both ways.
Government taught me the things the events world never had to care about: durability over spectacle, consensus over excitement, and the specific discipline of building something that has to work for the person who hates it as much as the person who loves it. A great event gets a five-star review. Good operational infrastructure just quietly keeps working long after everyone who built it has moved on.
What you get from genuinely operating in both worlds — not dabbling, but actually grinding, six and seven days a week, for years — is a range that's hard to develop any other way. You stop being precious about either sector. You take what works. You leave what doesn't. You stop caring where a good idea came from and start caring whether it actually holds up. What you're left with isn't loyalty to a sector. It's a standard. And the range — and the scar tissue — to apply it anywhere.
I've since hung up the headphones — but not the energy and not the ambition.
Years of building things from nothing on weekends taught me exactly what's possible when someone is given the room to think bigger during the week. And we’re at a crossroads where so many new innovations are changing the workplace landscape.
I'm ready to turn the volume up on whatever is next.
