I resigned today
- Oct 12, 2021
- 2 min read
My last day as an in-house Director of Marketing
Today I walked away from a Director of Marketing position, leaving behind good friends and a company I genuinely cared about. But deep down, I knew I was heading down the wrong path. I needed a change.
So this feels like the right time for a self-reflective post at the end of a shaky day.
My primary focus has always been to get to know and understand an organization from the core values to the outer skin like an onion.
What happens next? I’m not completely sure. But I know what it will include and what it won’t.
It will include empathy first. Emotional intelligence. Truth-telling. Listening.
It will not include funnels, sales tactics, or a pile of acronyms pretending to be strategy.
It will start with ideas. Like this blog.
At the company I just left, I spent the first year learning everything I could. The history. The “why.” The passions of its founders. What they understood better than anyone else in the industry. What they truly offered their customers.
I also realized the employees genuinely cared. They believed in what they were building.
And because of that, I knew the messaging was wrong. The branding no longer reflected the organization they had become. It felt loud, outdated, and self-congratulatory. Meanwhile, the company itself was growing into something much more thoughtful and capable.
I was entrusted with helping lead a rebrand, and it became a huge success. The messaging and identity finally aligned into a story people inside the company could believe in and rally behind. It felt truthful. It felt earned.
But afterward, something in me started to unravel.
Not because the company was failing. Quite the opposite.
As the focus shifted toward campaigns, spreadsheets, user journey reports, and sales initiatives, I realized I was bored. Worse than bored, disconnected.
Some of it felt like using the brand instead of building from it.
For years in agency settings, I’d worked through a process that sometimes felt a little like speed dating, but at its best was always about relationship-building. My goal was never simply to market a company. It was to understand it from the core values to the outer skin. To uncover the story and create a more honest and fitting expression of it.
Today I realized, without much doubt, that this is the work I’m meant to do.
Talking with founders, executives, and leaders. Understanding why they started. Helping them rediscover the thing they once believed deeply enough to build around.
This next chapter will be about finding those stories.
Helping visionaries tell them clearly, truthfully, and with conviction.
That’s the work of branding.
That’s brand strategy.
Stay tuned.
