Balancing the Grind with Valerie Duong, Head of Growth at Bare

Valerie Duong is the Head of Growth at Bare, the funeral provider for Australians looking for a better way to plan their own, or a loved one’s farewell.

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1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?

I’m currently the Head of Growth at Bare, an Australian death-tech start-up where I oversee our Growth Marketing across owned and paid channels in AU and international expansion. My earlier career was spent across various agencies and start-ups, from Uber to Koala, where I’ve mostly worked across performance and paid marketing.

2) What does a day in your life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?

My morning work routine starts with a cup of coffee and review of daily, weekly and month-to-date results. Then I’ll take a look into specific channels I want to dive into further. The death tech space is quite an intricate industry so, like any start-up,  macro changes can really change your day-to-day.

The rest of my day is spent balanced between meeting with different team members in my team to check-in on projects on email campaigns, our content plan for organic social, fluctuations in CPA with our paid channel specialists and meeting partner account managers at Meta, Pinterest and Google.

3) What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?

Work-life balance to me is understanding that your time spent outside of work impacts your life inside work greatly. Personally morning’s are my favourite time to decompress and clear my head before I start a busy work day, and I know that taking an extra hour to exercise, make my coffee and read sets me up for the day; similarly the time I spend socialising outside of work helps to de-stress me and improve my output at work. 

4) In the past 12 months, have you started or stopped any routines or habits to change your life?

In my role it’s easy to always be switched on, checking slack and caught in the constant doom scrolling of TikTok and Instagram, checking on performance. I’ve set time limits on certain apps to allow me to switch off properly.

5) Do you have any favourite books, podcasts or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?

I’ve been listening to a lot of Ad Spend by Triple Whale – I like this podcast because it reminds me of my old agency days where I had a lot of specialists in the same field to bounce ideas and compare strategies too. Moving in-house I don’t get as many opportunities to talk to people in the same field so always find it interesting to compare notes.  

6) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

Something I’ve found helpful was from the Happiness Advantage (by Shawn Achor) that finding fulfilment and being happy happens when we achieve. But it’s actually the other way around, we achieve when we’re happy. So spending more time doing things you enjoy, with the people you love, and investing time to develop crafts outside of the work day helps improve your ability to excel. 

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