PM Environmental’s Marketing Manager sits down with us to share about his role, as well as give some career advice.

Q: Name, Title, Location

Nathan Palcowski, Marketing Manager, (Remote) Wilmington, North Carolina

Q: Tell us a little about your role and what you do. 

I believe there are many different facets of being the Marketing Manager here at PM Environmental, a Pinchin Company. Depending on the time of year, different tasks can be at the top of the list of things to do, such as helping with registrations for conferences or tradeshows, generating content for our social media channels or using digital communications and marketing to help promote the national brand of PM, just to name a few things. At the end of the day, I, along with the Marketing team, am here to assist in promoting PM the best way possible.

Q: What’s the best career advice you have ever heard?   

Never stop learning. Whether you have been at your job for two months or 20 years, continuing to learn and be curious will make your job not feel so much like a job.

Q: What’s one word you would use to describe PM and why? 

Culture. I’ve worked in many different college athletic departments and far away PM’s culture is better than anything that I have been a part of. Everybody from the top down is a joy to work with and is always willing to lend a helping hand or provide insight into something you may not know about. I can’t speak enough about the culture PM has and I’m joyful everyday that I go to work that I get to be a part of it.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wanted to follow in your footsteps? 

Follow your intuition. During every step of my career, I have learned to follow my intuition and let that guide me to the places that I needed to go and make the decisions that had to be made.

Q: What’s the most important risk you took, and why?

Deciding to go to Western Michigan University was a pretty big risk that happened early on in my life. Since I was in middle school, the only college I wanted to go to was Northern Illinois University. I wanted to be close to Chicago and honestly just wanted to get out of Michigan. Well, life had a different plan as I chose Western Michigan because of a girl I was dating in high school. We all know how this type of story plays out, so I’ll spare the details. It was a risk, because I had only visited the campus once and didn’t know much about the university. Fast forward, it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life as I got my start in college athletics, and it propelled me to where I am today. It also allowed me to meet some of my best friends, whom I would have never met if not for WMU.

Q: What is something you wish you had known earlier in your career?

How important it is to manage work-life balance. Before PM, I worked nearly 10 years in college athletics and there is not much free time at all between working games, road trips, attending practices, etc. It felt like I worked all the time, and I never took the time for myself to relax and get away from everything, which ultimately ended up in me being burnt out. As I have gotten older and left athletics, I have realized that having a healthy work-life balance is incredibly important for a multitude of reasons and something I wish I would have managed better during my early years.

Q: How do you take your coffee?

I feel like I am one of the rare ones, but I take my coffee straight black.