Business Travel World-Wide
My third full-time job after college was for an international publishing company. I gave that company over 110% each day and reaped the benefits (as well as the stress) from it. I ended up having a company car with insurance and gas paid. And I never paid for a personal vacation trip! I made a lot of trips to Washington, DC to our editorial bureau in the National Press Building to oversee operations there and to hire office managers. The eighties were an exciting time to be in that city. I the best time after hours and on weekends with the editorial guys there. There were lots of fun restaurants and clubs and I always stayed in a hotel that overlooked the grounds of the White House. The hotel had an outdoor veranda that had a great happy hour. Of course, I visited all the DC sites as well as Virginia and Maryland. And I learned to drive in roundabouts – not always successfully but …
At one point in the 1980s I got to travel to London to visit the editorial bureau to expand my knowledge about the publishing industry as well as the particulars of the company. The Houston managing editor for the English business magazine traveled with me. We spent at least a day and evening in the office and getting to know the executives there. And what was so great, we had plenty of time to tour London. We even took at day-trip to Paris. We flew there and realized we didn’t know enough French to use underground transportation to visit all the famed sites. So we took taxis from one venue to another … the exchange rate favored us that day. Talk about an adventure!
The trip to Japan was one of my favorites! The multi-media production contractor and I traveled to Tokyo to participate in the company’s ad agency reception during the Advertising Agency International Conference. Imagine me, a young American white woman standing in the receiving line of Saudi gentlemen as we welcomed world-wide major ad agency execs! The clubs we visited afterwards were interesting, especially hearing American songs sung in Japanese. We toured all the good sites in Japan and even took the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. That was once in a lifetime trip!
Some info about my time with this company:
I managed the US offices of Saudi Research & Marketing in the Houston office. The owners and founders were based in Saudi Arabia – the Hafiz family. There were offices in London, Paris, Jeddah, to name a few. There were four publications, both English and Arabic at that time. There was also an advertising agency, Tihama in various locations as well. The office in Houston and Washington, DC was run by one of the family, a Saudi native and resident of the US who was educated at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he got his Masters and Doctorate degrees. He was married to an American woman and the family lived in Houston. When I started in 1979, there was me, a sales person, a reporter and a part time contract graphics designer.
I started out as receptionist where I learned all aspects of a publishing company from print to distribution. I learned the advertising business dealing with New York ad agency executives whose clients had ads in the publications. I was in my twenties and very young-looking and to sound more professional I changed my voice to reduce the Texas drawl. I basically learned about our advertising rates and policies by “talking the talk until I could walk the walk”. Those rate cards sure came in handy!
Before we closed the Houston office at the end of 1986, we had grown to over thirty employees with a complete advertising agency and production center in-house. I basically coordinated all aspects of the office, including some hiring and firing. I won’t even go into all the details I handled from shipping printing film to the overseas offices to learning the typesetting equipment and manually pasting up pages. This was way before everything went digital. I had the opportunity to move to the new Boulder office but I chose to stay in Houston.