…continued from Part III
2008 One Sailboat and One Corporate Takeover

When I closed out the last post I touched on the end of my time as a Marketing Director. I glossed over the fact that I found myself newly homeless, jobless, and relationship-less in the span of a few weeks. I’m not a big fan of stress, so I figured my only option was to check a goal off my list and try living on a boat. If you didn’t make the connection between living on a boat and having no stress, don’t worry. It was a complete non sequitur.  Oops.

Since this series is supposed to be more about the how than the why, let’s just say that I bought a sailboat in a tiny town on the Southern Oregon Coast. I was able to pay for it in cash so my monthly expenses remained fairly low. I don’t think I received a monthly utility bill for more than about $23 while staying on the boat. Most of the time the bill is so low that they don’t even bother sending it out for three or four months. The slip for the boat was less than $1000. Oh yeah… that’s measured in years.

Despite “housing” costs lower than what I paid in Panama, I still needed some kind of income. I didn’t quite have that figured out and was burning through cash reserves fast enough to prioritize finding a solution. After poking around on local websites, I found a web development company that appeared to have a good corporate culture. They had a feeler ad out for sales in another division of the company. Here we go again! I fired them off a two paragraph email. Here’s an excerpt:

“I was most recently working as an Internet Marketing Director for a small company in Portland. I also have several years of business management, design/development, and sales experience. If you have any interest in seeing my resume, please call and we can discuss that option.”

That’s pretty much the meat of the email. I didn’t have a resume, and I don’t think I ever put one together for them. They responded right away. After a few emails back and forth, we set a meeting for the beginning of the following week. There wasn’t much of an agenda. I’d already told them I wasn’t interested in a sales gig, but we decided to meet and see where it went.

I did as much online due diligence as possible between setting the meeting and attending the meeting. It was pretty clear that these guys were design/development types who’d started a company and took it to its current state. Beyond that, I started looking for gaps. It didn’t seem like they did much of anything in the way of SEO, PPC, or anything marketing related. I didn’t have a position fleshed out before I arrived, but that’s what was kicking around in the back of my mind. My thought was only that I needed to show them a degree of competence in an area or two that they didn’t possess. I was fairly confident that I could do that.

As I’m writing this, I’m becoming more and more aware that the story I recounted at that meeting was probably pretty similar to the first three parts of this series of articles. Sure, it was more heavily skewed to the internet and marketing related functions, but the framework likely mirrored what you’ve read. So I told the story up to this point, I asked them a few questions, and we parted company with a mutual feeling that we might be able to work something out.

After I left, I distilled the conversation into the bits leading to one goal: Building an Andrew sized hole in their minds. In this case, that was an amalgamation of building and managing an internet marketing program they could sell to their clients, project management, and a hint of design, development, and account management. Once I had that, I packaged it up into a pitch that made sense and we set another meeting.

I can’t stress two points enough. First, I have always focused on general knowledge rather than specialization. I believe generalized knowledge and skills combined with superior troubleshooting and problem solving skills is a much more compelling package than finely honed specialization.

Second, if you’re good at what I described in the last point, all you really need to do is get in. Once you’re in, you can build a position around your vision. Forget undersell and over-deliver when you’re talking about yourself. Oversell and over-deliver. You can learn enough to blow most people out of the water with a few days of intense research and study if you’re smart enough and confident enough. “Fake it ’til you make it” is an adorable saying, but I’d tweak it a bit. Fake it, then make yourself into what you described… but fast. The buried passive tone of the old axiom is the the real problem. Unfortunately, a lot of people get hung up on the word “fake” and get all “when keepin’ it real goes wrong” on us. That’s fine, let them be real and authentic and bore everyone with proclamations of their own real-ness. As long as you have enough time to get the chops before you need the chops AND actually develop the skills, everyone wins.

So anyway, I got the gig and got to work. In the first month I sat at my desk and absorbed and observed and churned out tons of material that became the company’s internet marketing program. I started off with a salary, and after 30 days, set up an arrangement where I’d get paid on all the work done by the ad hoc marketing division. After 90 days, I was making more than anyone else in the company. I didn’t find that out until later.

How I found out I was making more than anyone else was less than fun. I can’t get into too many details, but there was a certain aspect of their business that was hemorrhaging cash and the thins I was working on were essentially financing it. That eventually rippled through the finances in ways that required me to be informed. It was then that the idea of an equity position was first mentioned to me. Long-story short, I was the majority owner and Managing Partner at the beginning of my 8th month with the company.

A couple months later, I found I’d faked myself to a level above the scope of the company’s work and beyond the distance my partners wanted to travel. I started planning to launch my own venture, then resigned effective eight days past a year with the company. I’d had some fun. I’d learned a lot.

For those of you not still keeping an accurate timeline on your napkins, that’s the second gig in a row I left at almost exactly a year. I have a loose internal rule that if I don’t like something after trying it for a while, I can’t stay longer than a year.

The company I started was an advertising agency. Rather than build another Andrew sized hole in the minds of another employer, I decided to try building Andrew sized holes in the minds of clients. I went through the same process I’d undertaken in each of my previous jobs. I leveraged my skills together, connected the dots in logical package, and wrapped a package around it that made sense. My time on the client side of the marketing world combined with the creative and strategic side of internet marketing combined with my Art Institute days writing scripts, shooting video, audio recording, et cetera made an ad agency a logical fit in my mind. And guess what? It worked again.

Ad Agency Blog
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Ad Agency
Jet Atomic

Having recounted my journey in writing for the first time, I realize that the “how-to” aspect is a little lacking. Curses to you, “curse of knowledge”. I’m working on a post that distills the non-obvious things bouncing around in my head that were woven into this.

If you have any thoughts or questions on any of this, please comment below or send me an email through the contact page.

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