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To the board of directors of Draft Design Inc:
I’d like to submit Katherine Diaz for your consideration as employee of the month for April 2025. In this letter, I’ll set forth some reasons why and provide some background.
I first hired an assistant in 2014, because my hair was on fire and I was told, repeatedly, urgently, that hiring someone was a good way to make my hair not on fire. After a few months, it turned out that I was very bad at delegating. My assistant at the time begged to “feel useful.” Also, my hair was still on fire. So, bless her patient soul, I learned delegating on the fly and built something approaching a simulation of a role.
At a high level, the role is twofold:
- Protect the business from falling into a pit.
- Learn whatever you want.
I am very serious about the second bit. Want to learn HTML? Great, here’s a course. Want a book on inbound marketing? Charge it to our Amex. That assistant, bless her patience, figured it out alongside me, and stayed with us for 5 years.
Now people seem to like working for us, which is wild, since the company is literally a “culture” of two, and one of those people, to the chagrin of all of western civilization, happens to be me. Like most business owners, I am mildly insane. Unlike most business owners, I try to be kind while also being mildly insane. So the amount of standing calls where I anxiously await a client renewal while Katherine says, correctly, that it will all be fine would melt your brain, dear readers. It’s good that I have an assistant to talk to about this, because all of you on the board would have fired me long ago.
Over three and a half years with us, Katherine has handled her first duty handsomely: the business is pit-free. I think that is very useful. You probably agree with me, since your view is not that of the inside of a pit.
On top of that, Katherine has come to be the invisible hand behind Draft. She’s handled a lot of research activities, does all of our bookkeeping, and has made these letters mildly coherent, reading all of them (even the ones on text!) and asking “are you sure you meant that?” Which I never do, because I don’t know how to type on a computer.
Anyway, this recommendation has a bit of a sad note, which is that this is our final month with Katherine. She is moving on to other opportunities by leaving our very bad continent, correctly. In fact, a new assistant already started yesterday. So really, if you’re going to designate Katherine as Draft’s employee of the month at all, you had better do it now.
Finally, these messages have a habit of leaking to the general public. So in case you happen to not be on Draft’s board of directors, why don’t you hit reply to this email and thank Katherine for her years of service to us? Because she kept the whole dumb machine running, I owe her the world for it, and I’m going to miss her terribly.
Thanks for your consideration, and please let me know if you have any other questions.
Regards,
– Nick Disabato President, Draft Design Inc
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