Meet Tricia McKinney: A Creative, Driven, & Outside-the-Box Thinker

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in our new  We are EM (Monkeys Are People Too) series.

A Hardworking Youth

Growing up as the youngest of eight children in Los Gatos, CA, Tricia McKinney learned the value of hard work at a young age. She’s been working since she was 15 and put herself through college by working 30 hours/week, while taking classes full-time at CalState. This fierce work ethic, combined with her marketing internships along the way, led her towards the professional marketing consulting life she now leads.

Design Studio Managing Partner to Consultant

Tricia has been self-employed for 15 years, the first six of which were spent as a managing partner at Outside the Lines, a boutique design studio that focused on corporate identity, websites, and marketing communications. Along the way she accepted a product marketing consulting role; a position that was supposed to last a few months became a few years and Tricia discovered that she preferred consulting vs. owning her design studio. The variety of challenges that come with consulting appeal to her “get it done” attitude, she’s an excellent multi-tasker with great attention to detail, and she’s appreciative of the flexibility and balance that consulting affords her with her professional and family life.

A Strategic Marketing Communicator

Tricia possesses a variety of skills and experience, and never loses sight of a project’s overarching strategic goals. She loves the creative process of marketing communications; developing a concept from scratch, making something tangible, and conveying it in a way that’s not like everything else out there is a challenge that she savors. She’s worked with all sizes of companies and her sweet spot is with financial services and medical device companies. She’s most enjoyed her work on websites, though she’s also adept at event planning, advertising, collateral development, and almost everything in between in the world of marketing. She is an outside of the box thinker who is constantly devising solutions to problems and offering to help rather than saying no.

An Active, Memory-Making Family

When she’s not working, Tricia spends most of her time supporting her children’s activities, especially sports and school. Hers is a family that loves to ski together, and when able she and her husband love to instill a sense of adventure in their children by traveling to as many different parts of the U.S. and world as they can; her daughter was only two months old when she got her first passport. Tricia has used her own to visit the likes of Edinburgh, Tokyo, Florence, London, Montreal, Kyoto, Paris, Monte Carlo, and the Caribbean. She knows that making memories as a family will be the moments she’ll be able to treasure for a lifetime. Watching her kids have the greatest time of their lives makes those moments the greatest times of hers.