An Accidental Marketer (and What You Can Expect)

When I started college, I thought I’d be a therapist–until I realized I didn’t even like hearing about my own problems that much. So, I reconsidered. The Vanderbilt Career Center would probably love for me to tell you that I looked at the landscape, did a hundred informational interviews, filled out some personality inventories, and chose growth marketing for its impact and career potential. The truth is I ended up a marketer by accident, and a growth marketer by blind luck and a knack for overthinking.

I studied Human & Organizational Development and Psychology at Vanderbilt, and while I was there, I met a professor who would eventually become my boss at one of my first internships. I’d just taken a class on data-driven organizational design and had a fool-proof plan to hockey-stick her business:

• Step 1: Create beautiful dashboards and run elegant analyses.

• Step 2: ????

• Step 3: Profit.

Chomping at the bit to do some operations, I showed up on my first day just to discover that what she needed wasn’t operations. She was already crushing it. What she needed was help with social media. So I, less enthusiastically, jumped in and discovered that it was interesting, and I wasn’t terrible at it.

When I approached graduation, I was looking for a job, and serendipitously, she had a friend who was looking for a marketer. So, after a brief email exchange, I showed up at the address he sent me, dressed in my best suit, only to find myself in a bar interviewing with my future boss in a t-shirt and jeans. After briefly ribbing me about my overly formal presentation, he hired me.

Part of that interview was me telling him that I’d never taken a marketing class, had never held a true marketing internship, and didn’t really know the first thing about it. I’d just jumped in where my boss needed help.

No problem, he said. I want to teach you to market the way I want you to market.

So, I showed up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed a few weeks later for my first day, met with my boss for two hours, trying to soak up everything I could. Whatever misgivings I’d had about marketing to start with, I was ready to crush it as best I could and learn everything he had to teach me.

Best-laid plans, of course. The business hit a busy streak, and I didn’t meet with him again for six months. Six months of figuring it out, googling like crazy, and just trying to keep my head above water.

I want to be clear about a few things at this point.

• I loved this boss, and he had a greater positive impact on my personal and professional development than any I’ve had since.

• I learned more this way than I would have if he’d held my hand through every piece of copy I wrote.

But I wasn’t getting a lot of feedback on what I was doing. I had no idea whether what I was doing was any good or having a meaningful impact on the business. So I started installing analytics and looking at our data religiously.

And that’s how I discovered growth marketing. Nobody showed me Google Analytics and opened my eyes to how much better marketing could be with data. There was no magic carpet ride that showed me the wonders of UTM tagging or conversion rate optimization. I got into growth marketing by accident, because I was desperate to know if I was any good at what I was getting paid to do.

Straight up insecurity and not a lot of feedback. That’s how I ended up here.

Since then, I’ve had the good fortune to work for a handful of great companies, and worked with quite a few more informally. I’ve seen a whole spectrum of marketing challenges, from launching a brand to trying to get the first paying customer, building growth engines for the first time to repairing old ones that had stopped working.

I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who knew more about marketing than I did, and with entrepreneurs who believed advertising was a waste of money. I learned some communication strategies with both of them that helped move the businesses forward.

I still have a lot to learn, and I’d still have a lot to learn even if marketing stood still for 20 years. I have strengths in my marketing skillset, and I have weaknesses. My goal here isn’t to be some perfect beacon of expertise, or prescriptively tell anybody how to grow a business. At the end of the day, you have to build the marketing system that works for your company, your team, and your resources.

I’m here to be the resource I wish I had when I was a marketer fresh out of school and the resource I wish I could send to entrepreneurs just dipping their toes into building a marketing practice. I hope to provide some clear, actionable advice that will help young companies get their first customers and start thinking about growth engines. I want to give entrepreneurs who don’t have the money to hire a marketer yet the tools they need to at least start collecting data and running experiments, so that when they do hire that first marketer, they can hit the ground running.

More than anything, I’d like to make conversations between marketers and CEOs a little bit easier. So that entrepreneurs can get past the “it depends” answers from marketers to a workable strategy, and marketers can have an easier time explaining that it really does depend and not every marketing activity is going to pay off overnight.

When I can, I’ll use data to back up what I’m saying. When I can’t, I’ll tell you stories.

This is a passion project, so it’s free, and I don’t plan to make it not free. I’m not going to ask you to buy a course, I’m not going to save my best insights for a consultation with me. If you’ve got questions, ask me. If you’ve got a problem you want to bounce off me, shoot me an email.