By the time you’ve won your fourth state soccer championship in a row, it starts to seem a little ho-hum.
“It wasn’t until I got older that I looked back and realized, oh, that’s kind of a special thing,” said Molly Kruger, Well Done’s new Director of Sales and Marketing. After four years playing high school soccer for Carmel High School, Molly went on to play for universities like IU, UCLA, and Butler before taking a job with Indy Eleven as Peter Wilt’s first hire.
“Technically second, I guess,” Molly said. “I was employee number 002, after Peter.”
For five years, Molly helped grow Indy Eleven into the successful club it is today. Now she’s at Well Done, where she’ll apply her talents to new business development, share her love of Wes Anderson, and occasionally sit still to give an interview like this one.
When you worked for Indy Eleven, the temptation to give people team swag for Christmas must have been enormous.
Oh, everybody got gear—family, friends, everyone. I was in charge of merchandise for a while, so that was a nice perk. I’d give Indy Eleven hoodies, scarves, hats, all that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that stuff was always purchased, per se, but being in charge of promotional items meant I had a little of everything. Phone backs, wine stoppers, pet food lids.
Pet food lids?
That was from our partnership with the IndyMega Adoption event. Any time I could come up with a promotional item that fit a need with our partners, I went for it.
When you’re talking to potential new clients, how do you figure out what they really need and whether Well Done is a good fit?
Every company is different, and there’s really not a one-size-fits-all approach for anything. It’s important to know who you’re speaking to. My degree is in organizational communication, which focuses on analyzing how a company communicates internally and how it can be more effective.
But there’s a larger application for those skills, too. What you learn is that everyone speaks a unique language, and that affects their goal for their company, how they want to present themselves, how they want their brand to come across. Understanding what they’re trying to communicate, and how, is a huge part of what I’ll do at Well Done.
And I’m also learning about the agency. I’m a pretty genuine person, and I’m not good at selling something if I don’t believe in it. Being new, I’m learning a lot about who Well Done is and how we can best serve clients. So far, I’ve learned that we have a group of really talented individuals who truly care about our clients.
Your office décor has a distinct theme going—there’s an Eli Cash poster, a throw pillow covered in Wes Anderson characters, a Bill Murray clock. What’s your favorite Wes Anderson film?
The Darjeeling Limited. The first movie I saw was The Royal Tenenbaums, but Darjeeling has a lot more emotion behind it, I think. It’s more outwardly sentimental than his other films.
And both movies are about family. You’re the youngest of five, right?
Right. I grew up in a big family, and for a long time my older siblings did the talking for me. When I was four or five, my grandmother took my mom aside and said she was concerned because “Molly wasn’t really talking very much.” That’s not something anyone would accuse me of now. At some point a switch flipped, and you couldn’t get me to shut up.
What are you most looking forward to about being at Well Done?
Agency life is a whole new world to me. Even this early on in my career here, it’s been fun to meet new coworkers who all bring such different things to the table. With my background in communications and understanding personalities, I’m eager to see what makes this company as good as it is and find out how I can contribute. That’s the central question in my position, I think: How can I help this organization flourish? I’m excited to find the answer.