Last month, after 15+ years in strategy (account planning, digital strategy, content and audience strategy), I made a professional shift to be more on the business end of the business. I went from having a very specific job title (Account Planner) to having a more general one (Managing Director), and I did this without changing company, or boss. That probably sounds either risky or like it’s not actually a thing. And that’s why I’m sharing.
I did my fair share of professional soul searching as the pandemic forced change all around us. And as a recovering change addict, who has done the work to learn that wonderful things can happen in life when you choose to stay, I found myself confronting some old demons and reflexes — to jump ship, to quit, to move, to do something completely different. But my itch to change wasn’t just environmentally inflicted. It had been a long time brewing and through conversations with what I call my board of directors (we can talk another time about why a sole mentor is a myth), I realized that as a strategist I was too far away from the place where business and brand building actually happens. I had contributed to multimillion dollar businesses but I hadn’t managed them. I had a seat at the table but I wasn’t having ad-hoc calls with decision-makers about how they were feeling. I was working in brand strategy but I wasn’t getting the satisfaction of building and launching brands.
Ask and Twitter delivers. One evening as I was scrolling and mulling how I would make my career move, Michael Barber said this:
And it hit me. Running a business was about bringing people along and that’s what I’m good at. Running a business was about being intimately involved in the health of the client relationship, accountable to the team and our shared success, responsible for the numbers — the top line, the bottom line, all of it. And I wanted that. I wanted to be an account person.
I gingerly raised my hand to cover the matleave of a colleague I adore and deeply respect, who was running a pretty big portfolio of business. For five months I would be learning on the job, reporting back, and trying out this kind of role. It was like being back at school. I had notebooks filling up fast, I would meticulously prepare each morning for what I had on the docket, I pored over reports, spreadsheets, and org charts, I feel like I read every article about their industry, every word of every email I was Cc’d on, and paid so much attention to people’s body (and face) language on video calls that I would end the days utterly fatigued (and only sometimes slightly paranoid: Had I heard them right? Read the room right? Did I listen enough? Was that a subtle hint about the budget? Do they even want awards? How can we help get that client get their promotion?).
As agencies started to stage a comeback, the very concept of client partnership was being tested. There was whiplash on budgets, on confidence in marketing, on clarity of communications. Things got frothy and spend was up, then virus variants crept into conversations, the street responded and clients reacted. We had teams burning the midnight oil and talking about burning out, and as people who’d done their own professional soul searching reached conclusions about leaving and moving, we were operating over capacity and honestly over delivering. The business doubled, then tripled.
Lord grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish — Michelangelo
Two thirds of the way through my apprenticeship, if you will, my boss approached me about a bigger role, running several portfolios of business and responsible for a large consumer brand marketing team. I was completely surprised by the ask. Was this a professional stepping stone or a landmine? Was this the job I hadn’t realized was the one I really wanted? As I floated it to a couple of friends outside the agency but in the biz, they all said, “Ohhh that makes so much sense.”
I’ve always been a student of brands, sympathetic to brand management on the client side, and amazed by what can happen when you create a client-agency team of people that are completely in lockstep, speak candidly (even though occasionally it stings), and make decisions together. A big part of why I left my role as a strategist was because of the disconnect. I had become wary of strategy and creative leaders who have that whole schtick about “the work would be great if wasn’t for the clients,” (you know the ones, who sh*t talk the clients because they think it’s how you bond an agency team). And I was sick of seeing those people smugly talking about the work, without having any accountability or frankly understanding of how budgets were discussed or managed. I had in effect jettisoned my old agency allegiances, determined to support and platform the ones really doing the work of brand building every day, while staying vigilant about creating space on my teams for those who respect and understand what Mr. Barber had tweeted.
So I’m only a few weeks into this new job. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have a leadership team around me who know me and see how I operate and keep inviting me to step into new kinds of leadership within the same company. I’ve been at my agency for nine years and I’d always wanted to experience a dynamic career, where every few years there are real challenges, moments of fear, and opportunities to stretch.
As New York yawns and stretches and comes back to life, as new global brands emerge and are launched in Bushwick and on TikTok, as stores pop-up in vacant retail space, as restaurants and hotels host opening night with influencers doing all the heavy-lifting, and as the great agency shakeout puts former colleagues on opposite ends of the same table, where some of them are clients or the clients become teammates, there isn’t a more exhilarating time to have changed everything without changing much at all.
Having the same work email, same log-in credentials, building pass, and water bottle is somehow freeing up my mind for the higher order tasks associated with doing a new job, allowing me to focus on building teams, building brands, and bringing people along in a way I couldn’t have done by jumping ship.
