I’m excited to announce that I am relaunching The Second Row, the marketing communications firm I founded in 2017, to focus on working with clients involved in mental health and wellness initiatives.

But first a bit on how we got here.

A Great Virtual Opportunity

Three years ago, I joined Virtual, Inc., which provides strategic and operational services for industry associations and technology standards organizations, as the company’s Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations to transform their struggling marketing communications team.

At the time, I was hesitant to put aside the innovative work that I was doing at The Second Row collaborating with clients like iRobot, the inventor of the Roomba® robot vacuum; Allstate’s mobility data and analytics start-up Arity; the MassMen project, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and several others, but the opportunity with Virtual was too good to turn down.

At Virtual, my charge was to modernize how the Association Management Company’s (AMC) marketing communications team operated. Over the first year I created and implemented The Five Tool Framework, my comprehensive approach to designing, planning, executing and optimizing marketing communications programs and campaigns from the ground up. I also recruited and hired several new leaders, while developing a deep bench of current and future marketing and PR superstars from within. Virtual also won several marketing industry and creative awards for our client work during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

Our results were undeniable, growing revenue by over 70 percent (to $2.9 million), increasing the client base by almost 80 percent (working with over 45 organizations), the size of the team by 40 percent (15 to 21 full-time employees) and the top-line profitability of the group from 6 to 26 percent. We achieved all of this amid a global pandemic, which forced the Virtual Marketing and PR crew to become really and truly, virtual.

In February 2022, the senior leaders at Virtual told me that I was not the right person to build on the foundation that I had worked so hard to create with my team, and my position had been eliminated.

I didn’t see it coming…  I was stunned.

Reading and Reflection Result in a Realization

If you couldn’t gather from the results I outlined above, I did what I was hired to do and more. I am tremendously proud of what we accomplished at Virtual. But the sudden nature of my departure from Virtual compelled me to reexamine everything. I spent a lot of quality time with my kids Tess and Declan, who are 11 and 9 years old, as well as my girlfriend Kira.

I also invested quality time and sustained effort in myself.

I did lots of reading (I’ll share a few recommendations in a future post), committed to an exercise routine, journaled and meditated regularly and re-connected with my close friends and my favorite colleagues from the past. A lot of the work was focused on my next professional step, but what became more important during that time was answering two fundamental questions: what kind of people did I want to work with and what kind of work did I genuinely want to do?

As the neighborhood cleaned up the remnants of winter here in the north of Boston, something began to take root for me personally. I understood that my path to professional success was simple; look inside myself to discover a direction that would be true to myself and find real meaning in my work.

What I have found is that the people in my life – the ones who I truly love and deeply connect with are involved in some way with mental health, wellness and mindfulness, and it’s not a coincidence.

The mother of our children and my coparent is an outstanding therapist focused on working with teens and young adults who are struggling with gender and identity issues.

Kira, who has understood me at a depth and intimacy that humbles me every day, is a reiki master, a expert user of the Internal Family Systems therapeutic framework and a teacher of meditation and mindfulness workshops.

One of my two closest friends from college owns his own mental health practice in Salem, Massachusetts, the other is an executive with one of the fastest growing family therapy practices in the mid-Atlantic.

The results are in and undeniable: I have a type. These are the people that enable me to be my best self that I genuinely love to be around. I realized that I needed work that would allow me to engage with people and organizations that are like the close friends and loved ones that I have learned so much from about mental health and wellness.

My New Vision and Intention for The Second Row - Part II

All my efforts to date professionally, including a 13-year tenure with Matter Communications (I was their first employee in 2003 and today they are the biggest PR agency in New England, with over 250 employees), the success of the first version of The Second Row and the transformation and growth of Virtual’s marketing and public relations group – have prepared me for this important step.

My vision for the second iteration of The Second Row is an imaginative, engaging team of strategists, designers, writers, marketing gurus and public relations pros focused on the creation, identification, telling and amplification of real, inspired stories and campaigns that will educate, persuade and impact our communities about what our clients are doing in mental health and wellness.

My intention is, in a real and meaningful way, to contribute to a greater good on behalf of the people and organizations that I respect, know and love. We will collaborate with our clients to create outstanding marketing communications strategies and tools that will enable them to do more impactful work with the individuals, populations and communities that they serve.

What we do, how it benefits the clients that we work with now and in the future will be covered in my next post, stay tuned…

In the interim, reach out with any questions you may have. And if this post has resonated with you or someone you know, we should connect and talk it over. You can reach me at matt@thesecondrow.net or 617.699.7205.  

Cheers,

Matt