A conversation with Rachel Golden Smith, Maestro Group’s Head of Content and Messaging, on the art of interpretation, the science of syntax, and spring peepers.
March 20, 2024
The pleasure and peril of profiling my closest work colleague is that when I check the automatically generated transcript, our sentences are so intertwined in rhythm, and simpatico in opinion, that the AI confuses one person for another. As Head of Content and Messaging, Rachel Golden Smith oversees the writing and editing team. She serves as the last checkpoint before we regard a deliverable, a training, or an important email as “finished,” which makes her key to the quality control and—I would dare to say—the signature voice of Maestro.
Having a talented, reliable, and meticulous supervisor is a growth opportunity. Having that person as your friend is an outright gift, and I’m not just saying that because she sent me a mug that says, “This is my emotional support em dash.” (In return, I sent her a mug with the company logo of “Quint’s Sharking,” which may ring a bell for those who have seen Jaws, Rachel’s favorite movie.) We have collaborated on messaging audits, helped launch Maestro’s redesigned website, and seized on every possible excuse to buy books to review.
But just because you have come to know someone well doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot to learn about them still.
When I ask Smith what’s the one language insight that she could download into the minds of everyone she encounters (which sounded less dystopic at the time, I swear), I expect her to offer up a persistent, pesky rule of grammar—some error she’d never have to correct again, such as how to properly hyphenate or when to use an en dash. Instead, she says she’d like to help people become more conversational and to strip away the jargon associated with their industry. She wants them, as the great authors do, to write the same way they talk.
“That’s why my favorite prompt is, ‘Explain what you do to your grandmother,” Smith says, citing a prompt we use in interviews. “Because it helps me understand what you do when I’m first starting out with your company.” She recalls working with a client who specialized in finance tech, in a field peppered with acronyms. Her initial intimidation eased as she found that even other bankers, when she talked to them, didn’t grasp the nuances of debt financing.
“I took children into salt marshes and showed them fiddler crabs,” she says, contrasting their respective professional expertise and educations (more on the fiddler crabs later). But for either party, the same curse of knowledge needed to be overcome. “I’m better sometimes when I am farther outside of someone’s specialty,” Smith realized. “Your prospects are probably more like me in terms of understanding the ins and outs of what you’re doing.”
In addition to having a genuine curiosity about the world, Smith understands that many disagreements or lost sales opportunities are really translation issues—and she has mastered the art of interpretation. “In high school, I got this little sign that said ‘Interpreter’ that was made for me by one of my classmates,” she remembers. “I have a knack for figuring out, ‘Okay, you think she’s saying this. But she’s actually saying this.’ People will get all in a flurry, and I’ll say, ‘Stop! You’re saying the same thing!’”
Once the core ideas are in place, helping with collateral requires not only a steady hand with hyphens and dashes, but adding a generous dash of humor to copy—and knowing how to help clients differentiate themselves. Drawing an analogy based on helping her niece with a college essay, Smith points out, “Everybody is a 4.0 student, everybody is in Honor Society, everyone did this, that, and the other.” But the moment she found out her niece could play her guitar behind her head, she knew what the essay’s hook needed to be.
“You have to figure out what’s going to resonate with a group of people. What are their pain points?” The more into the audience’s head that Smith can get, the more she can help. When writing an email campaign that went out to museums, a setting she herself had worked in, she knew to make jokes about the gift shop.
First, we mentioned salt marshes, now we’re talking museums: what exactly is Smith’s origin story? She holds a Masters of Science in Environmental Education from the College of Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, which she earned following a BS in biology cum laude at Duke University. (Before that, she was a fellow student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science Technology. We overlapped in years, but we didn’t attend the same prom; at Maestro, only founder Will Fuentes holds that particular honor.)
As an Adult Environmental Education Program Manager for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in North Carolina, her home state since 2002, Smith created materials for the general public; before that, she worked with children. But picturing field trips to see fiddler crabs doesn’t capture the heft of her service. She secured more than $180K in grant funding. At one point, attempting to address the disposal of unused medicines into the local water supply, she assembled a task force that included an NC Department of Agriculture rep and a DEA agent.
The quixotic nature of the latter effort, Smith admits, left her ready for something new—first by becoming a stay-at-home mom to two kids, then by joining the Maestro team. Our ever-changing roster of clients offers ample opportunity to revisit her interests in science and tech. If the client’s field is not already in her wheelhouse, she doesn’t hesitate to tap into her community to find help. When Maestro worked with a company specializing in cold-spray metals, she pulled in her father, a naval architect, for consultation.
“I spent time with him, asking, ‘Okay, is it annoying when a ship has to go on dry dock?’” She remembers. “’Are you losing money when a ship has to go on dry dock?’”
Whether talking about melting ice caps or bears encroaching into Asheville city limits, Smith as a wonderfully balanced way of framing environmental matters. The understanding that everything is connected is what can transform a hot take—e.g., “hunting is bad”—to an appreciable reality: when neighbors in her rural town go hunting, they make chili and stew from the bears they kill, and those bears aren’t then creating danger in Asheville’s backyards. Maybe hunting isn’t so bad after all.
Smith feeds her understanding of how everything connects through constant reading. “I’m a nerd,” she says. “I love researching.” When chatting about a topic on Slack, we’ll sometimes post a 🐰 or 🐇 emoji, meaning that we’ve found a rabbit hole. Since my indulgences are in art and poetry, I appreciate her scientific and methodical approach to grammar, syntax, and managing attention. We’ve both taken to the habit of running blog posts by our partners (“the husband test”) to make sure we’re not so far down the rabbit hole that we’re in Wonderland.
Since she’ll periodically punctuate a workday by saying, “I’m going for a walk,” I ask her to paint a picture of what that walk looks like. Their property is 28 acres, with five flat acres of a field.
“The house is in one corner, and I’ve walked a rut around the field. I like to walk around the field five times. I’m usually listening to a podcast and the dogs are running into me,” she says. “There’s trees everywhere around me, so I feel like I am totally by myself.” Along her route, she is stopping to identify flowers and (when she can come up with the species) butterflies and keeping track of when things return and bloom. I’m not surprised to learn she has a flair for taxonomy. At the edge of the pond, she’ll often spot frog eggs and toad eggs.
“So there’s blobs of eggs,” she reports, “and then there’s these ropes of eggs. Tadpoles are really hard to identify.” Fortunately, what her eyes can’t discern, her ears can. “We opened the door last night, and I thought, ‘Well, spring peepers, and then American toads: that has to be it, because that’s all I’m hearing.”
If you’re looking for someone to help you accelerate your sales, you probably need the person who can help you manage your pipeline and make a deal. But you also need the person who says, with utter sincerity, “I could dip a net into a creek or pond all day long.” Meaning: you need the forager, the questioner, the discoverer, the one who will tie it all up into a memorable phrase. “It’s like a treasure hunt; I’m ready to find something every time.”
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