Laura

Hello, my name is Laura Arber and I am the Traffic Manager at Bing Design. When I tell people outside the agency world my title, I follow up with “No, I do not work for an automobile dealership, and No, I do not direct traffic at busy intersections.”

So what do I do? The short answer is project management … The kicker is that I am the one person who is aware of every open project going on at Bing. Every. Single. One.

I receive projects from our outstanding Account Executives and assign them to our talented design staff. I then make sure the project stays on schedule and on budget. This last line sounds so simple… but the pot has a lot of hands in it: clients, account executives, designers, creative directors… I am the person who gets everyone to sing Kumbaya and still be productive.

How to do this wasn’t taught at Wright State University. But we manage. Over the years we’ve developed processes and put the right people in place to make it work.

I like my job. I really like knowing what everyone is working on. I’m not sure that everyone else always likes me poking into their business, but I do get to say ‘It’s my job.’

I left the corporate world to come to Bing, and working for a small company is outstanding. It helps that I am only six blocks from Kismet, a cute boutique in Yellow Springs. Google maps tell me it’s 0.5 miles from my office, which means I can walk and shop in a lunch hour. There’s nothing better.

So the next time you meet someone who tells you “I’m a Traffic Manager,” you’ll know that person ‘knows it all.’ If you’re interested in more tales from the traffic side of agency life, I recommend a blog called “Traffic Patterns.”

About a dozen days after Ohio’s wind storms, electricity has (finally) been fully restored to Bingers’ homes. (Our office in Yellow Springs was lucky enough to regain power within four days of the outage.)

We’d like to thank all of your clients and vendors who were flexible during this situation. We tried our best to minimize disruptions to your projects and schedules. Ultimately, we hope you didn’t even notice that we were without power in Yellow Springs.

If you have any comments or suggestions about how we handled these circumstances, we hope you’ll share those with us. We treat every new experience as something to learn from … and “hurricane hits Ohio” fits nicely into that category.

In case you’re curious about how we “kept the lights on” for clients, see the photos below for a few of our virtual locations during “Blackout 08.”

• Todd worked from a Panera Bread in Columbus. Panera had a two-hour time limit, so he had to strategically change locations throughout the city.
• Selby worked from Wright State University where her husband is a med student.
• Joe worked from his brother’s office in downtown Dayton.
• Laura worked from her kitchen counter in Kettering, and Roger claimed dibs on her dining room table.