In retrospect, when the top brass at a Winnipeg-based, 25-person consulting firm started making routine trips to the USA, it probably should have signalled that a sell-off was in the works. What I really couldn’t know at the time was the positive effect it would have on both my career and personal life in the longer term.
When my CEO broke the news to me, it was devastating. I genuinely loved what I was doing and who I was doing it for; the rarest workplace commodity for a guy like me. It felt like I could have been there and been successful for a long time.
I wasn’t just leading the org’s marketing efforts either. I rebuilt their brand from the ground up, single-handedly overhauled the website, and refined operational processes in ways that had our small firm hitting way, way above its weight. Things were going well financially for the business too; leadership had always been transparent about that. I was damn proud of what we’d accomplished.
Unicorn vs. Sharks
When I got told that “we’re being acquired”, looped in a mere weekend before the rest of the org, I couldn’t comprehend where I went wrong, panicking about what my new normal might look like and mourning the impending death of my career unicorn. As traumatic as the news was, things felt even worse when I first met the acquiring marketing team. They were supposed to be mortal enemies (we were acquired by a competitor). I felt like I was being circled by sharks while hemorrhaging confidence about my job security. I helped with the transition in a big way, but I expected to be let go as soon as that job was done.
There were five of them. I couldn’t comprehend how I’d fit in and make things work with my lone-wolf mentality still at large, a feeling that worsened when I figured out what all their capabilities were as the weeks went on. Each of them had a niche and each of them was exceptional in it, making a coordinated, high-performing marketing team that didn’t appear to be missing any talent.
Finding a Place in All This
In the long run, our team (myself included) was comprised of the perfect mix of cross-functional capability.
- The CMO: the crow bar by which our name made its way into the right rooms and provided what we needed to make the most of that space.
- The Demand-Gen Director: the operational mastermind that kept our marketing mix massive, impactful, and coherent across every channel you can think of.
- The Creative Director: the immensely talented brand visionary that dared defy every facet of the tired ‘blues’ and ‘purples’ common to the tech industry these days.
- The Brand Strategist: the team’s scrum master, meticulous project manager, and digital advertising builder that could ideate and execute simultaneously.
- The Marketing Strategist: the especially clever and social-media-savvy old soul that gave our work massive exposure and growth where it mattered most.
And then there was me, a marketing Swiss Army knife who could do any of those things a little bit. My new team mates were incredibly patient and supportive while I rattled around trying to find a problem to solve; staring perceived obsolescence in the face. Thinking back on it, it was really just the most abrupt version of career growth I’d seen thus far. I‘d been the “do everything” guy for a long time. Adjusting to my new team-based reality gave me an understanding about scale that I didn’t have before.
It wasn’t long before I started to carve out a niche of my own in the paid advertising space (the one marketing component our team had been outsourcing) and as a product marketing resource that could occasionally stand-in for an actual SME. As my impostor syndrome and job security concerns faded I found a similar sense of belonging to the one I started with before the acquisition. This time though, I had a whole team with me. I had marketing friends, which have proven to be the best kind of friends. Our internal team culture was one of trust, support, gratitude, mild sarcasm, and routine hilarity that turned out to be one of the best experiences of my career so far. It was another unicorn I’m grateful to have been a part of.
The Benefits of Unicorn Team Culture
As time went on, our team saw incredible success and even met IRL once for an RKO event. Planning and executing multi-touch, B2B, MDF-supported, ABM-supported, demand-gen campaigns to Fortune-500 companies leveraging an impeccably strong brand for massive ROI isn’t something you can do on your own successfully (I tried). As part of this unicorn team, we collectively made it look easy. It felt easy and I genuinely enjoyed working with them every day. In terms of raw accomplishments, we capped a whopping $40M in marketing attributed pipeline in a single year, and matured a whole bunch of processes for online events, MDF management, and ROAS along the way.
I learned so much in the short time we all worked together, but the highlights are in how to build a high performing team, the importance of internal team culture, the benefits of an internal circle of trust, and how being friends first can actually make for substantially better results at work.
I was lucky, twice. But I hope to find another unicorn or two in my career going forward.