My first marketing job paid nine dollars an hour and the desks were folding tables, the kind that pinch your fingers when you snap the legs out. No playbook. No mentor down the hall. Half of what we were doing didn't have a name yet. I was running split tests on copy before anyone called it A/B testing, not because I was ahead of anything, just because I wanted to know what actually worked and that was the only way to find out.
For years I tried to describe the job in words that fit on an org chart. CMO. Head of growth. Strategy. None of them ever sat right, and I used to think that was my problem. It wasn't. The thing I do doesn't live in a box.
What I actually do is walk into a company and feel where it's leaking. Where two teams quietly stopped talking but keep shipping anyway, each one sure the other has it covered. Where the number on the dashboard and the thing the customer actually felt have nothing to do with each other. That space, the one nobody owns, is where the money goes, and the trust goes with it. I've spent fifteen years standing in it.
Somewhere in there I stopped believing the problem was the marketing.
You watch it enough times and it stops being subtle. The founder leaves the room lit up. Leadership leaves motivated. The directors leave with action items and good intentions. Ninety days later everyone's frustrated, and the honest part is that nobody failed. They just walked out of the same meeting having heard five different meetings. The strategy was fine. The translation fell apart on the way to the work.
One team I worked with put the same website on the agenda every Thursday for half a year. Every week, agreed it mattered. Every week, moved on. Marketing figured creative was waiting on them. Creative figured leadership was still deciding. Leadership figured it was already getting built. Six months in, the site looked exactly like it did in January. Nobody dropped the ball. The ball was never in anybody's hands.
Agencies. Manufacturers. Nonprofits. Software companies. Family shops running the whole operation off one spreadsheet somebody's scared to touch. Different industries, same thing underneath. Most business problems are people problems wearing a quarterly report.
Most business problems are people problems wearing a quarterly report.
I learned a lot of this the hard way, inside investor-backed companies where the pressure never really lets up. Every quarter is a scoreboard. Every dollar has to explain itself. I won't pretend I didn't get something out of that, because I did. It taught me to know my numbers cold, to ship before it's perfect, to stop being precious about ideas that aren't working. That discipline is real and I still use it every day.
But there's a bill that comes with growth-at-all-costs, and it never shows up on the slide. People start getting treated like rows in a model. And a company can get so good at optimizing that it optimizes away the one thing that made anybody care in the first place.
So I kept the discipline and left the rest of it.
These days I work mostly with founder-led and family-owned businesses. The ones who want to grow but not turn into someone they don't recognize on the way up. And I've quit calling the work marketing, because that was never really the job. The job is translation. Standing between strategy and execution, finance and creative, the spreadsheet and the actual person on the other side of the screen, and making sure the meaning doesn't fall apart in transit. The companies that win aren't the ones with the most technology. They're the ones who lose the least meaning between deciding something and doing it.
Everyone keeps waiting for AI to make this matter less. I think it does the opposite. The tools can write and analyze and automate and predict, and they're getting frighteningly good at all of it. What they can't do is care, or decide what something means, or know who it's for. The more the internet fills up with generated everything, the more the human underneath it is worth. We're finally getting pushed toward the part that was only ever ours.
None of this is theory for me. I've taken my own life apart and rebuilt it more than once, and every single time, the thing that nearly wrecked me turned out to be the thing that freed me. Telling the truth about who I actually am, and building from there instead of around it. I learned to lead the way I learned everything else. Scared, and doing it anyway.
If your title has never once described what you actually do all day, you might be a translator too.