I started anyway.

Within a few days, I had barely looked up.

It poured out. I’ve been building websites since 1996, and WordPress is genuinely comfortable territory for me — I’m a front-end content creator more than a designer or developer, but everything the portfolio required came easily. Uploading photos, organizing galleries, writing descriptions of my role in each project, pulling together PDFs and dates and documentation. The technical work didn’t slow me down, which meant I could just keep going. And I did. About twenty hours of work over roughly four days, and it didn’t feel like twenty hours. It felt like something clicking into place.

The harder work was the excavation.

To build the portfolio, I went digging. Old hard drives. Photo archives. Flickr. The Internet Archive, for projects whose URLs had long since gone dark. Graphic design files. Promotional materials. Documents and spreadsheets and event programs from years I had half-forgotten. And as I dug, things surfaced.

I remembered the reading series I ran for a year in New York. I remembered serving on the board of a regional conference. I remembered the small private groups I’d facilitated for years — intimate, carefully held, logistically precise in their own quiet way. One by one, things I had filed under “other work” or “community stuff” or simply not thought about in years came back into focus as exactly what they were: events I had produced.

The organizational challenge became its own kind of revelation. I kept trying to sort my experience into categories for the portfolio, and kept running out of boxes. I’d think but where does this fit — pondering nearly two decades of retreat and workshop production — and then realize I needed a whole new category. And then another. The shape of my event experience kept expanding as I looked at it directly, which I hadn’t really done before.

That’s the thing about a through-line: you don’t always see it while you’re living it. You’re just doing the work in front of you. It took laying it all out — chronologically, categorically, with photos and documentation and my own words describing what I actually did — to see how consistent it had been. Events hadn’t been a side project or an occasional responsibility. They had been the spine of my professional life, running through almost every chapter, even the ones I’d been calling something else.

When I finally looked up after those four days and started clicking through the finished site — all the categories, all the case studies, all the evidence of what I’d actually built over the years — it felt a little magical. Not because I’d made something impressive to show other people. But because I could finally see it myself.

From there, the next steps were obvious. A shorter PDF version of the portfolio to include with job applications. An updated LinkedIn focused on event experience. A skills-based resume that led with what I actually know how to do. And then: research. Informational interviews. Reaching out to contacts in the Seattle-area events industry, and sending cold emails to people I’d never met, hoping some of them would be willing to talk.

That’s where Part 3 picks up.

Zaedryn (Zed) Rook is a Seattle-based event producer with 20+ years of experience and hundreds of events across formats, scales, and industries. They are currently seeking a full-time position on an established event production team — as an individual contributor ready to bring deep expertise to work that is larger, more complex, and further-reaching than what any one person builds alone.

What Zed brings

Zed’s experience spans the full lifecycle of event production: concept development, logistics, vendor negotiation, contract management, budget oversight, marketing and audience development, participant experience design, and day-of execution. They have produced destination weddings, multi-day residential retreats, national conferences, multi-city book tours, virtual summits, and large-scale university programming. They are as comfortable building from scratch as they are joining an existing team and infrastructure.

Their skills extend beyond operations. Zed brings a full marketing toolkit — digital strategy, email campaigns, audience development, branding, and content — and has consistently grown attendance, revenue, and community engagement across the events they’ve produced. They are fluent in the tools of the trade: Cvent, Asana, Eventbrite, Social Tables, HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe Creative Suite, and more.

Zed leads with emotional intelligence, communicates clearly, and operates as a collaborative team member — picking up tasks outside their lane when needed, deferring to others’ expertise in their domains, and consistently working to understand the full picture rather than just their individual piece of it.

What Zed is looking for

A mid-sized or large organization with established infrastructure and a dedicated events team. A role that combines strategic thinking with hands-on execution. A hybrid work environment with a home base in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. Events that are complex, large-scale, and nationally or internationally reaching.

Zed is interested in a wide range of industries — universities, airlines, worker-owned cooperatives, corporate, nonprofit, and beyond — and is actively researching the Seattle-area events landscape. They are not targeting any specific sector, but are drawn to organizations with clear values and a collaborative internal culture.

Zed is not seeking sales roles, commission-based compensation, or positions where relationship-building is tied to quota pressure.

What Zed needs from a team

Clear communication. Feedback that is direct and constructive. Leadership that explains the reasoning behind decisions, measures growth explicitly, and treats the team as collaborators rather than subordinates. A culture where expertise is respected and learning is ongoing.

Next steps

Zed’s resume, portfolio highlights, and contact information are available at zaedryn.com/hi. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zrook. Email: zaedryn@gmail.com.

If your team is building something big and you’re looking for someone who knows how to help build it — let’s talk.

You put together events that are bigger than what any one person could build alone. You’ve got systems, infrastructure, colleagues with deep specialization, and the kind of logistical complexity that requires real coordination to pull off. You’ve been doing this long enough to have learned things the hard way, and you’re good enough at it now that you do it well. You’re not scrappy for the sake of it. You have resources, and you use them thoughtfully.

I’ve been producing events since 2003. Hundreds of them — retreats, conferences, destination weddings, multi-city tours, virtual summits, university programming, community gatherings. I’ve done the full stack: concept, logistics, vendor negotiation, budget management, marketing, participant experience design, day-of execution, and the long exhale after it’s over. I’ve built things from nothing and I’ve joined things mid-stream. I’ve led teams and I’ve been a team of one.

After twenty-plus years of doing this, I know I’m ready to go further than I can go alone.

Bigger events. More complex logistics. National or international reach. A team of people who each bring something I don’t have, so that together we can build something none of us could build separately. That’s what I’m looking for. Not a stepping stone. Not a side project. A place to actually land and do the best work of my career.

Here’s what I’ll bring to your team. I show up as a full contributor — I pick up tasks outside my lane when the situation calls for it, and I defer to people who know more than I do in their areas of expertise. I ask questions because I want to understand the whole picture, not just my piece of it, and I share context with others for the same reason. I’m not interested in being the smartest person in the room. I’m interested in the room producing something excellent.

I work best in environments with clear communication, real feedback, and the kind of leadership that explains the why behind decisions rather than just issuing directives. I thrive when I’m trusted to do my job and also given room to grow in it. I’m a hybrid worker — I don’t need to be in an office every day, but I’m absolutely present when presence matters.

What I’m not looking for: a sales quota, a commission structure, or a culture where relationships are primarily transactional. I love building connections and I’m genuinely good at it, but I do that best when I’m not under pressure to convert every conversation into a close.

I’m based in Seattle and rooted in the Puget Sound area. I’m interested in organizations of real substance — mid-sized or large, established enough to have resources, and values-driven enough to use them well. Industry is less important to me than culture. I’ve worked in nonprofits, universities, community organizations, and independent ventures. I’m curious about airlines, worker-owned cooperatives, and sectors I haven’t explored yet. What matters most is that the work is meaningful and the team is solid.

If you’re reading this and thinking yes, that’s us — I’d genuinely love to talk.

You can find my resume, portfolio, and contact information at zaedryn.com/hi. I’m also on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/zrook. Reach out. Let’s see if this is a fit.

photo of downtown Seattle and Mount Tahoma taken by Zed, 2022

Content marketing, specifically — content writer, content marketing coordinator, content marketing manager. I had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost a decade, and I got swept up in it. Everyone around me was a content creator, an influencer, a cult of personality, or building the next big app. I wanted to be on a marketing team doing interesting experiments — figuring out how to get the message about a quality product to exactly the right people. And honestly, I needed to make a livable wage, and tech seemed like the most direct path to that.

So I searched. LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, newsletters, job trackers, AI tools. I applied for hundreds of positions, customized resumes, wrote cover letters from scratch. I did a nine-week training program on breaking into tech specifically designed for woman and marginalized people. I hired multiple job coaches. I got good feedback every time — strong resume, solid cover letters, good interview presence. In six years, I got three interviews. I rarely even got a rejection email, let alone a callback.

I still don’t know exactly why. Maybe the market is flooded. Maybe they don’t want to hire someone over 40. There are other possibilities I can’t rule out. What I know is that it didn’t work, and at some point, continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results stops being persistence and starts being something else.

Life also had other plans during those years. I moved twice, lived through a pandemic, went through a divorce, and spent a significant stretch of time dealing with personal matters that made a focused job search basically impossible. By 2022, I was back in Seattle, rebuilding, and trying to figure out what came next.

What came next, for a while, was education.

I moved near the University of Washington and started doing temp work on campus. It wasn’t a surprise that I loved it — I’d been a college speaker for years, worked at San Francisco State University for three years, and had always felt at home in the particular ecosystem of a university. Staff at universities often get tuition benefits, and I’ve always wanted to go to grad school. The work felt meaningful. The environment felt right.

But I couldn’t get traction. No interviews, no lasting contacts, and — if I’m honest — I still didn’t know what specific role I was trying to land within higher education. I loved being there. I just couldn’t figure out how to get in the door.

The pivot to events happened in a conversation with my job coach.

I was talking about what I’m actually good at — networking, connecting with people, making an impression quickly. I said something like: most people, within five minutes of talking to me, get a positive impression and think I’d be worth hiring. What I need are a few good people in my corner who are interested in helping me find the right fit.

She said: there are industries built on exactly that. Hospitality. Events. And — she pointed out — I had a lot of event experience.

I knew she was right the moment she said it.

What followed was a hyperfixation of the most productive kind. I built a web portfolio, redesigned my resume as skills-based, updated my LinkedIn, and put together a PDF of portfolio highlights. And to do all of that, I went digging — through photo archives, old hard drives, the Internet Archive, Flickr, graphic design files, documents, data, dates, promotional materials from events going back to the early 2000s.

That excavation changed something.

I knew I had event experience. What I didn’t fully understand, until I laid it all out, was how extensive it was. How far back it goes. How consistently it runs as a through-line through every chapter of my work, even the chapters I’d been labeling as something else. It had always been there. I just hadn’t been looking at it directly.

When I started looking at event job postings, I matched every skill. When I looked at the software lists, I’d used most of it. When I had informational interviews, I knew what questions to ask without doing much research first, and the research confirmed I was asking the right ones. The industry pays a living Seattle wage. It’s built on relationships and networking rather than disappearing into a job board void. And I am genuinely excited about doing more of this work: bigger events, larger budgets, longer reach, a team to build with instead of a ceiling to bump against alone.

I’m not grieving the pivot. This doesn’t feel like giving something up. It feels like finally looking at what was already there and deciding to take it seriously.

That’s where Part 2 begins.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve been designing and executing events that bring people together with intention. I’ve produced hundreds of events across formats, scales, and communities — consistently growing attendance, revenue, and engagement along the way. This isn’t a second career or a pivot. It’s what I’ve been building the whole time.

2. I don’t just run the event. I build the whole thing.

From the first concept conversation to the final vendor payment, I’ve handled every layer of event production — logistics, contracts, marketing, staffing, participant experience design, and day-of execution. I’m not someone who needs a fully built machine handed to them; I know how to build it from the ground up. That means fewer gaps, fewer surprises, and one person who actually knows what’s happening at every stage.

3. I’ve worked at wildly different scales. Intimate retreats, a week-long destination wedding in Alaska, national conferences, a 10-city book tour. Scale doesn’t rattle me.

I’ve produced 5-day residential retreats, multi-city author tours with simultaneous virtual components, large-scale educational conferences at universities, and a destination wedding in Alaska with 100 guests and 8 days on-site. I’ve also produced small community events with scrappy budgets and big hearts. I know how to right-size my approach without losing rigor.

4. The numbers have gone up everywhere I’ve worked. I track what matters — attendance, revenue, engagement — and I move it.

Strategic marketing, smart audience development, and genuine community outreach aren’t afterthoughts for me, they’re baked into how I plan from day one. I’ve grown attendance and revenue across very different kinds of events by treating growth as a design problem, not a hope. I measure what’s working and adjust; I don’t just repeat last year’s plan and cross my fingers.

5. I actually like the hard parts. Vendor negotiations, tight timelines, something going sideways at 6pm on event day — that’s where I’m most useful.

Real-time troubleshooting is practically a love language at this point. I stay calm when things shift, I make decisions quickly and clearly, and I don’t need hand-holding when it gets complicated. Contract negotiation, budget management, competing deadlines, stakeholder management: these are the parts of the job I find genuinely satisfying, not the parts I hand off.

6. I can fill a room AND run it. I don’t hand off marketing, email campaigns, or audience development and hope for the best.

I bring a full marketing brain alongside the operations brain: digital strategy, email marketing, social media, branding, messaging, and content strategy. I’ve built promotional campaigns from scratch and managed outreach for events with national reach. That means the event I produce is also one people actually know about and show up to.

7. I’ve led real teams. Volunteers, staff, boards. People who needed direction, not just a task list.

I’m a co-founder of multiple organizations and have worked at the board level, which means I understand both the operational and the strategic layers of leadership. I’ve managed volunteers who needed motivation, staff who needed clarity, and stakeholders who needed confidence. I lead with emotional intelligence and clear communication — people know what’s expected and why it matters.

8. I care deeply about how people feel at events, not just whether the logistics worked.

Participant experience is the whole point. I design for it intentionally, from the flow of a schedule to the way a room is set up to how people are welcomed at registration. I’ve spent years as a skilled facilitator and workshop designer, which means I think about the human moment, not just the operational checklist. A smooth event that leaves people feeling unseen is still a missed opportunity.

9. I know the tools. Cvent, Asana, Eventbrite, Social Tables, HubSpot, Adobe — I’m not learning on the job.

My software toolkit spans project management, event registration, CRM, marketing automation, virtual event platforms, venue layout, and design — and I actually use them, not just list them. Platforms like Airtable, Trello, Monday.com, Mailchimp, Zoom, Hopin, Salesforce, and the Adobe Creative Suite are all part of my regular working vocabulary. Whatever your team is running, I can get up to speed fast — and I’m probably already there.

10. I write well. My run-of-show docs, vendor emails, and proposals actually make sense. Turns out a creative writing degree comes in handy.

I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Washington with dual degrees in Creative Writing and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies — and yes, it shows up in my work. Clear, warm, professional communication is something I bring to every document, email, and deck I produce. If you’ve ever worked with someone whose run-of-show reads like a fever dream, you know why this matters. In addition, I’m well versed in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — not just in theory, but through lived experience, community involvement, deep education, and 25+ years of unlearning and re-learning.

Thanks for reading!