Team Building & Management
I believe that a good company culture and office environment define the groundwork for a strong workforce. When working with a new team it is important to establish goals & an open dialog, great ideas can come from anywhere so a safe space allows each person to both reach their potential & maximize output for the company.
Setting up a new team often includes these essential steps:
• Set clear goals with task driven steps on how to obtain them
• Design an organization system that is simple to remember but Excel's in function
• Define roles, prioritize job responsibilities & set deadlines
"Working for Chelsey has been one of the highlights of my time at Fan Creations - she is a great leader who pushes her employees to grow and learn every day. She's incredibly creative, kind, and a strong manager. She knows her employees' strengths and makes sure they are taken care of. I'd love to work for her again!"
Lisa Mills
2020 - COVID and Uncertainty
This was an unprecedented and hard year for all of us, with it came specific challenges especially during the shutdown. When Georgia went into lockdown our company shut it’s doors and 80% of our workforce was furloughed. The remaining employee’s were split into teams and as the Art Director I led a new team of five, only one being from my original design team. In the weeks from home that followed I trained two for social media engagement, one to set up print files for future production and one to manage our licensee brand guidelines. Slack was installed on every computer to keep up communication and Google Docs was utilized to track goals, ideas & work completed.
Art Director for Fan Creations 2019-2021
When I took over as Art Director in 2019 I spearheaded a complete overall of how our company handled designs & production. New documents were created to better track each products design history & approval status, all of our active products were reconfigured to make for a smooth design to print transition and our printing was streamlined to better handle dropship output of online sales. I managed four graphic designers in creating new products for retail, reconfiguration of our website, reaching larger audiences in marketing and streamlining our approval process with licensees.
Interoffice communications is done through Slack, daily projects are managed through Trello and more involved organizational tracking is done via Google Docs.
CNC Opperations Manager for Fan Creations 2020
In 2020 I was given the responsibility of managing the production of our materials at our secondary warehouse. We have three machinists who are each at difference levels of English fluency, with Spanish being their first language. Working together we developed a system to better communicate (relying heavy on Google Translate but with independent Duolingo study as well). I listened to the problems this area was having and worked with everyone to develop strategies on correct previous gaps in communication & process errors. Together we set up a new organization system to track the output of what was needed & delivered for material, but also to collect information on the entire process as a whole so that future employee’s will have a point of reference when learning the system.
Junior Art Director for The Highland Mint 2012-2017
I assisted in managing seven employee’s in the Art Department for The Highland Mint, each who split their time between production and product design. I would get a creative brief from the CEO & Sales manager on a product assortment then delegate it out to the rest of our team. Brand quality & information accuracy was a top priority so I was also responsible for proofing everyone’s work & ensuring that everything was delivered on time.