Episode 137 – Emily Hunkler

Introducing Emily Hunkler

Emily is the director of growth at GoWP. She lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her two daughters and her husband. When not working, Emily loves running both on the road and trails. On weekends, she also loves hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Show Notes

Twitter | @emalihu

Website | Border Tramp Travel Guide (outdated information)

Website | GoWP

Niche Agency Owners Facebook Group

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 137.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Emily Hunkler. Emily is the director of growth at GoWP. She lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her two daughters and her husband. When not working, Emily loves running both on the road and trails. On weekends, she also loves hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Welcome, Emily. Glad to see you today.

Emily: Hi, happy to be here.

Liam: Really happy to have you join us. Thanks, Emily. How are you? And tell us a little bit more about yourself, please.

Emily: Thank you for having me. This is great. I am, like you said, live just outside Atlanta. I have two daughters. One will be turning four in November and the other one is 16 months. So that is a lot of what defines me these days I’d say. Apart from that, I am the director of growth at GoWP. I handle all the marketing stuff and community growth and customer success and that sort of thing.

I live here in Atlanta with my family, who’s my two girls and my husband, Mark, who is from a small town outside Barcelona, Spain, where we previously were living for the last six years up until 2018. I’m originally from Ohio. I mean, that sums me up at the moment, I’d say.

Tara: I was reminded of a guest we interviewed recently who is from the UK and he’s living in Spain as well. So I want to ask you a little bit about that experience. What sent you there and what it was like being an expat? Seems like maybe a more popular thing that I knew of with having two guests on our show who both were expats in Spain or at one time were.

Emily: Yeah, it’s super popular in Spain specifically, I think too because of the weather, I guess, and cost of living and those sorts of things. For me, I had previously been working at a newspaper up in the Adirondacks as a newspaper reporter. I worked there for a year and kind of just needed a change. I don’t know if it’s the extreme winters that there are up there or what, but I was looking for something new. I originally went to Spain as an English language assistant. In the public school system there, it’s a program that they’re government runs. You can apply and they’ll place you somewhere.

I had requested Barcelona and they gave me Igualada, which is a town just outside Barcelona. So not quite what you asked for, but it all ended up great in the end. I was there for one year doing that. Came back to the States and spent the next two years traveling through Central America and doing a travel blog on traveling Central American on $20 a day. Then decided that…I don’t know if I decided or ki...