Employee Growth Josh Wilson
Protos Employee
Growth Story
Josh Wilson, Creative Director
Protos is dedicated to supporting and encouraging our
employees to grow both personally and professionally. We strive to offer our employees ongoing training and development opportunities to ensure they are the best they can be. Whether it’s someone’s first week or ten-year anniversary, we do everything we can to help our employees succeed.
Josh Wilson is just one example of the many inspiring success stories within our organization.
In this month’s edition of our employee growth story series, we are featuring Josh Wilson, our Creative Director, who is celebrating his ten-year anniversary with Protos this month! He originally began working part-time as a freelancer for Protos in January 2013 and was officially hired full-time in 2016. Read on to learn more about Josh’s unique and fascinating journey with Protos!
Based in Roanoke, VA, Josh was acquaintances with the founders of Protos, Chris Copenhaver and Patrick Henderson. As a company of about 10 people at the time, Protos did not have a marketing department and they were in urgent need of some help in that area. Knowing that Josh had recently started a freelance one-man business for graphics and media, they took a chance and sent some projects his way. None of them knew at the time that this would be the start of Protos’ marketing department.
Surprisingly, Josh’s career path was not originally graphic design. In fact, it was the total opposite – he has a biology degree and worked in various laboratory jobs after college, but his interest in computer graphics, photography and video kept growing. Over the years he became a self-taught expert in all things digital media and design. Eventually, he took the risky decision to leave his day job and start his own company.
After Josh completed his first few little projects with Protos, it was off to the races.
“Patrick showed me the very first beta of the Client Portal running on an iPhone. We had three months until the first trade show of 2013. I didn’t really comprehend it at the time, but I could tell by the excitement that this was a big deal, and the word game-changer was getting used A LOT!”
Trade shows were nothing new to the company, but there hadn’t been much traction. How does a fledgling company of 10 people compete for attention and stand out against the industry giants? “In those three months, we reinvented everything related to the trade show booth experience, who we were as a company, and most importantly, we had an app to show. We were now a technology company operating in the security industry years before anyone else.”
That first year resulted in a lot of new clients and momentum that allowed the founders to add to the team and put together a lot of key pieces that kept the company growing. One thing led to another and Protos became his biggest client. For Josh’s first four years at Protos, he managed everything from the Protos website, advertising and marketing projects, building unique trade show exhibits and even compiling all the data analytics reports for Protos’ growing client list. All this and he wasn’t even a Protos employee.
“At the time I was really at a crossroads. Protos was more than half of the work I did each year and juggling other clients was getting much harder. It was time to decide if I wanted to grow to be my own agency or grow within Protos.”
He chose to become a full-time Protos employee and started wearing even more hats relating to the office computers and network, as well as the difficult task of continually managing office expansion as the employee headcount continued to explode. But it was his creative side that really shined when it came to tradeshows. He built interactive games that attracted lots of attention in our booths over the years. Some of his projects included building a giant security-themed operation game, a whack-a-mole machine, designing a comic book series laid out as an advertisement in a magazine and many more.
“Working for a tech-enabled company, I’m always looking towards the future and constantly learning about media trends in the advertising and marketing world. Staying ahead of the competition has always been a priority to me.
Over the past ten years, Protos has gone from a company of ten people to hundreds, and it’s been a wild ride. I take pride in being one of the first people here. I’ve had the opportunity to really shape the look and feel of this company as it grew into a real industry-leading brand. Being able to say that I help clients understand our story is something I’m very proud of. I have enjoyed working for a company that is constantly growing and evolving.”
It’s safe to say that Josh was a team player from the start. He has written many chapters throughout his journey here. Over the years he has watched the marketing department grow, led rebranding efforts and developed industry-leading design projects. We truly appreciate Josh for always going above and beyond to make anything possible. We would like to congratulate Josh on his ten-year anniversary with Protos. Thank you for all that you do!
Josh is one example of an employee who has experienced tremendous growth during his time with Protos. Stay tuned as we continue sharing stories about the success of our employees over the next few months.
If you are interested in learning more about Protos and want to work with us, view our current job opportunities.
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