Chiefly Growth Origin Story
How It All Began
The origins are many. Years spent in growth-focused leadership roles at companies large and small, including large enterprises like Target and Etsy, and start-ups like Codecademy and Bright Cellars. Prior to that, another lifetime on the agency side. My work in marketing and growth spanned the very typical: channel and ad platform management, brand marketing, product marketing, media, creative and content development, forecasting, analytics, people and resource management, daily report cards in the form of metrics and milestones. It’s a broad and deep set of skills in today’s marketing and media environment. I remember my first agency role, there were a number of us meeting with a media partner, many of us were new to the agency, the media partner commented about how the “kids” coming into the industry today (I was a kid then, he was talking about us) weren’t like they used to be. These kids had to know things, they had to be skilled. I had zero frame of reference, it was essentially day one for me, I didn’t know things. It was the dawn of the digital era, marketing was changing overnight, with the addition of technology, data, and analytics in ways that were seminal and deeply transformational. I learned the old ways, but I jumped at the chance to create new ways in a new era.
My professional experiences were not all typical though. I developed and launched a menu of ad products and reporting for the General Motors dealer groups. I had the opportunity to play a central role in transforming Target into a media company and learned a lot about agile and product development (legal too, sad face). I worked in start-up environments, working side by side with Finance in a marketing-dependent business model, and learned the ways of venture capital. I developed ways to turn brand and product fans into advocates at scale. I helped B2B companies open up new direct-to-customer sales channels.
We don’t often talk about the sum of our professional experiences, but I think it is the sum that matters most. All these things accumulate and shape us, certainly our skills and ability, but they also meld into a framework for our thinking, they place our vantage point, and shape our perspective. We are not the product of an experience, we are shaped by our experiences.
This origin story is not entirely professional, there are personal sensibilities at play here too. These influences are broader, deeper, and more longstanding. There are a few that play an outsized role here: innovation, efficiency, and excellence.
An innate ability to innovate, to see what should be, envisioning and assembling all the pieces to bring it to life. Innovation often includes looking at the same things that we all see, we can all recite them, we know them well. The innovation part can come from seeing them differently, a different organization of the parts, a new application for the old thing, a different starting point. Necessity is the mother of invention is a wonderful quip, but it’s not a true maxim. Innovation is birthed by motivation, by the pursuit of excellence, often in the confines of specificity and focus.
A hunger for efficiency, this particular flavor is underscored by constraint. My love affair with efficiency stems from the truth that efficiency allows you to do more, or less. Efficiency creates optionality. Efficiency produces the same result or better, but with less. How can you not love efficiency? Alongside efficiency lives constraint. I view constraint as a catalyst. My experiences supported the notion that constraint aides focus because it necessitates clarity, and the combination of clarity and focus transform constraint from a limiter to an advantage.
Finally, a sensibility that is genuine admiration for quality and excellence. There’s a certain joy in witnessing someone who does something incredibly well. A reverence for products honed toward perfection in form and function.
Somewhere these themes meet at a place of clarity, dedication, and purity of purpose. These themes forged Chiefly Growth.