Sometimes the career fits the moment in life. Or so it’s been for Clayton Collins, our Lead Dad of the Week from Raleigh, N.C.
A few years ago, he and his wife Danielle decided to move to North Carolina. Her job working for Prosek, a top communications and marketing firm, and his move into commercial real estate allowed them to relocate from Stamford, CT.
The career he left had been pretty great, though not the party starter that was his first career. (More on that below.)
In Stamford, Clayton worked for NBC Sports. “I was a 75-flight-a-year producer for a decade,” he said. “I’d worked with impressive people and done interesting things, but I wasn’t serving my community. I was just always out in the field. I’d connect with people from work, only to dash out for a 6pm flight and never to see them again.”
When the conversation turned to becoming parents, he began to wonder how he could be the father he wanted to be and still have a career. “We were at a crossroads. We were planning a family around the Tokyo Olympics. I was going to spend two months there and I didn’t want my wife to be pregnant with me away. But we were putting our life on hold for work.”
His own father had been a model for looking at the long game in life. He had been a successful banker in Alabama but never liked it. So, he went to medical school – with two young children – and became an OB/GYN.
“People thought he was crazy at the time,” Clayton said. “He just felt he had more to give. I watched my dad have this unlimited supply of energy required to be present. It’s amazing to see how he balanced his time. He showed up for me just as he showed up for other people.”
And that’s what Clayton is aiming to do for his three-year-old twins. He’s closing real estate deals, but he also makes time to take my kids to swim practice.
If anything, this was a life he imagined as a boy when his first career was thrust upon him. While still in high school and hoping to be an actor, he was cast as the love interest in the first music video of a then-unknown country singer. The song was called “Tim McGraw”. The video was shot at Johnny Cash’s ranch. And the singer? That would be Taylor Swift.
“She hadn’t been on national radio yet,” Clayton said. “Then she went out and exploded, and it was my senior year in high school.”
He went to L.A. to try his hand at acting. Amazing experience, but he said: “Commercial real estate had been the plan before the Taylor Swift thing happened.”
And now he has a story – and the photos – that his twin daughters will one day be wowed by!
