We are excited to introduce Topher Howden, the newest addition to the Ayokay leadership team as our Director of Operations. Topher brings a wealth of agency experience and a unique perspective on what it takes to make a team truly successful. With a deep commitment to mission-driven work, Topher joined our team to streamline our internal systems and ensure we are delivering the highest quality results for our clients. We sat down with him to discuss how he supports our team and why he believes delivering great work is about much more than just the final product.
Q&A with Topher
Q: What is your position at Ayokay and what does that entail?
A: I am the Director of Operations at Ayokay. That means that I am in charge of how the work gets done day to day and how we define what our standards are in terms of what we’re delivering for our clients. I oversee how our teams are supported, challenged, and held accountable in terms of the work that they’re delivering, and how projects stay healthy by looking at things like scope, timeline, quality, and resources. Finally, all the fun stuff of internal systems, documentation, and processes falls under my purview.
Q: Do you have a favorite part of your job as operations director?
A: The shortest one-sentence answer is that I support our teams in executing the work that they do for our clients. The part of the job I love the most is supporting our teams in delivering wins for our clients.
Q: What brought you to Ayokay?
A: I wanted to work for an agency with a purpose. I was attracted to the mission-driven clients that we support doing things in the community where my family lives.
Q: How has your previous work experience elevated or contributed to your work here at Ayokay?
A: Professionally, I’ve spent a long time working in marketing and advertising, and I’ve worn an incredible amount of hats in that time period. Because of that, I have a lot of experience in a lot of the various functions of a marketing, web design, or advertising agency. My job as Director of Operations is to support the folks who comprise the team in terms of getting the most out of them, helping them be successful, and removing obstacles.
It obviously helps a ton having sat in a lot of those seats before to be able to know what pressures they’re facing and what obstacles exist. It allows me to do all I can through coaching, encouragement, processes, and systems to be able to mitigate as many of those obstacles as possible.
Q: What’s one thing that you wish people knew about your job?
A: The one thing that I wish people knew about operations is that if you are a good operations manager, director, or VP — whatever level you’re at — you cannot win without the team behind you. I can’t win unless the whole team wins. No one in operations can win if the team isn’t winning.
We are very much like a coach, where occasionally we will get praise that actually should be directed to the team and the folks doing the work. Our job is to hopefully put them in good positions to win.
Q: In the world of marketing & advertising, what do you wish people knew?
A: A lot of people focus on the output of the thing they see — the bus stop ad, the billboard, or the commercial on television — and get too focused on that final product. I think that a lot of times we would be better off thinking more about what the messaging is, how it impacts that audience member that we’re trying to reach, and what value we can bring to them, as opposed to just adding another distraction into an increasingly busy ecosystem for information.
Q: What are some areas you’d like to learn more about while at Ayokay?
A: The real answer is that I haven’t had a ton of hands-on experience working within development for web. I’ve spent a lot of time doing audience strategy, content audits, and a lot of the prep work, but not the actual development. At Ayokay, we sit at that intersection of creativity and technical know-how, and getting to explore the technical side of things more than I have previously has been really exciting for me.
Q: What is an unexpected experience that you think prepared you to be an operations director?
A: The reality is that being a parent is just doing operations, but you’re doing it for free. You are managing schedules, workloads, and resources, and making sure that everybody is taken care of. You just call that day-to-day life, so you don’t think about it in terms of operations, but the reality is I do operations professionally and then I personally go home and operate for a team of three children. So much of my professional life bleeds right into my personal life, down to the shared calendars that we all operate from so I can find out where people are at any given moment.
Q: What do you like to do for fun?
A: I have a wife, three children, and a rescue hound. I collect vinyl and play video games. And then I’m asleep the rest of the time.
Autumn is Ayokay’s Marketing Operations Manager and oversees all client marketing work with a particular focus in digital advertising, social media, and email marketing. When she’s not juggling various client projects, she also supports internal marketing efforts to spread the word about how Ayokay can help their organization.
