Who I Am

Including:

The professional picture. All of the other pictures on this page are amateur by definition.

Writing, writing, writing

I am John E. Bredehoft, and I have enjoyed writing for a while now.

And for a while I’ve been able to make a living at it. With the exception of my first jobs as a paperboy and a library assistant, every one of my positions has required some level of writing. Articles for my college newspaper. User manuals. Zines (in my previous brief foray into business, Gresham Press.) Requests for proposals. Responses to requests for proposal. Marketing requirements documents. And other documents that I’ll address a little bit later.

Yes, I was writing back in college. But I wasn’t writing strategic plans.

And when I wasn’t getting paid to write, I was writing for free. A college dorm newspaper, the Eastport Enquirer. Nearly a dozen personal blogs since 2003, a few of which are still running. Two professional blogs.

I guess I’m a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type.

Establishing Bredemarket: how did it happen?

Anyway, things were going well in my corporate career, and I had even celebrated my 25 year anniversary with IDEMIA and its corporate predecessors. (I wrote about that here.)

Less than a month later, I became a “free agent” due to COVID. Now some other people don’t describe what happened to me as “becoming a free agent.” They describe it as “being laid off.” (And, as you can guess, I wrote about that also, right here.)

As a free agent, I started out by looking for a new team to join. But when one of my LinkedIn contacts (a former MorphoTrak employee) saw that I was looking for work, he asked if I could complete a consulting project for him. After a couple of similar requests, including one from a company to which I had applied, I found that I had become an independent contractor by default. (And yes, the story is here.)

So I formally registered Bredemarket with the City of Ontario and San Bernardino County, and with other private businesses that allowed me to offer my services.

For nearly two years, Bredemarket was my primary source of income.

Then I accepted a new employment position in May 2022. While this has required me to pivot my business away from certain biometric customers, and while the time that I spend on Bredemarket is dramatically reduced, I’ve continued Bredemarket as a part-time side gig with a new emphasis on local (Inland Empire West, California) customers. (Although I’m still serving my former customers, as long as they’re not involved in finger/face/secure document identity.)

And here we are.

Benefiting from my experience and expertise

Bredemarket clients will benefit from my communication experience and my technical expertise.

My communication experience has been honed in my functional roles in

  • corporate strategy
  • strategic marketing
  • product management
  • corporate communications (print, digital, and social media)
  • event management (speaking, demonstrating, and organizing)
  • proposals
  • user manual writing and editing
  • other experiences in my distant past (I don’t think anyone is going to hire me to write for a college newspaper)

If you’re interested in learning more about these functional roles, you can check my LinkedIn profile.

My specific technical expertise in identity is primarily based upon my twenty-five years working for IDEMIA and its corporate predecessors, and offers a deep understanding of friction ridge (finger/palm) and face biometrics, coupled with an understanding of other biometrics (iris, voice, DNA) and secure documents (driver’s licenses, mobile driver’s licenses, mobile ID).

My technical expertise also encompasses other technical disciplines (databases, event mobile applications, marketing software, proposal software), and is transferable to other technical markets.

My Bredemarket consulting experience has not only allowed me to delve more deeply into some of the technologies that I already knew, but has also exposed me to new technologies such as content management systems. It’s always good to learn new things.

Writing, writing, writing: what I’ve written

So what types of pieces have I written during that time? Let’s see…

  • Corporate internal communications. Monthly executive briefings. Alignment of U.S. division objectives with the objectives of the non-U.S. corporate headquarters.
  • Event management. Conference presentations (company user conference, International Association for Identification, Oracle OpenWorld). Speaker/session coordination, logistics schedules, and presentation dry runs. Speaker biographies. Speaker abstracts. Conference application (CrowdCompass) social media content. Trade show booth demonstration scripts. Video testimonials.
  • Marketing, internal work. Customer site lists. Competitor site lists. Competitor factsheets. Executive briefings. Company/competitor product feature comparisons. Sales playbooks.
  • Marketing, external work. Customer maps. Emails to mailing lists. Corporate newsletters and newsletter articles. Corporate website content Product datasheets. Social media plans and content (blogs, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, CrowdCompass conference application, retired services such as FriendFeed and Google+). Thought pieces. White papers.
“John, how do you use the CrowdCompass app for this Users Conference?” Well, let me tell you…
  • Product management. Requirements documents. Product launch materials. Change control meeting materials. Product marketing materials. Product proposal content. Partner materials.
  • Proposals. Competitive proposals. Sole-source proposal letters. Responses to Requests for Information. Sample proposals. Standard proposal text. Proposal schedules. Request for Proposal and source selection.
  • Quality. Process creation and updates, primarily in the requirements management key process area (SEI-CMM). ISO 9000 exposure.
  • Strategy, internal work. Prospective market evaluation. Product offering concepts.
And it’s a nice bonus when the strategy work scores you a trip to Paris.
  • User manuals. Software user guides in printed and HyperTalk format. (HyperTalk services no longer offered.) User manual editing.

Now many of these were provided under nondisclosure and/or ghostwriting agreements, but I’ve written up some anonymized descriptions of some of these jobs. See my “past illustrations” posts.

If Bredemarket can help you with any of these things, please contact me.