It was a bitterly cold February day at Sugarloaf in Maine. The kind of day that gives you corn kernel snow – super fast, but super sketchy. The light was flat, making the morning runs even more exhilarating as little bumps in the trail seemed to come out of nowhere to send you flying through the air. I was 12 and I was LOVING it. Old enough to be an adrenaline junky and young enough to be able to bounce back from a fall. Or so I thought.
It was the last run before lunch – isn’t it always? We were cruising top-to-bottom on Narrow Gauge, which goes from Black Diamond to Blue Square to Green Circle. The base lodge came into view as I crested a cross-cut and caught some air. The flat light obscured the landing and I didn’t see the second bump just ahead as my skis touched down. In a blink, I was down – skis went left, poles went right. I came to a stop 15 yards down the slope. Total yard sale.
I felt a tweak in my upper leg, but I trudged back up the trail and put my gear back on to continue on to lunch, assuming everything would be fine after some food. Fast forward 30 minutes and I could barely walk. I looked like a toy soldier trying to march through the base lodge. So my parents sent me off to Ski Patrol to assess how bad the injury was.
Ski Patrol was great – they checked me out, iced me up, and were ready to release me within the hour. But I was 12. They wouldn’t release me without a parent because I was a minor. This wasn’t a hospital – it was the local ski patrol. So my parents had NO IDEA this was a thing and cell phones weren’t around yet. So they put out the APB – every chair lift on the mountain had signs requesting that my parents head to ski patrol to retrieve their son.
An hour went by, then 2. The lift attendants started making announcements at regular intervals. No luck.
It wasn’t until the lifts CLOSED 4 hours later that my parents realized they were needed and came to check me out. It was a long afternoon.
But it taught me an important lesson about life – sometimes, nobody is coming to bail you out. Sometimes you have to figure out how to make the most of a difficult situation. And sometimes you have to rescue yourself.
Let’s fast-forward to May 2021, the lesson I learned in Ski Patrol that fateful day in February came in very handy.
I was 1 week into my new role as Director of all of our agency services. I spent that week talking 1:1 to everyone in the department to get a better sense of who they all are, what they did, and what they wanted to do.
My company had a long history of choosing man power over automation to execute all of the various tasks that needed to be done in a week, and I had identified that as the biggest area of opportunity. By implementing automation, we would dramatically increase profitability, make our capacity (nearly) infinitely scalable, reduce human errors, and allow our team members to do more creative & fulfilling work that moves the needle for both the company & for their own growth.
We had a team of 15. 5 of them spent 40 hours per week pushing buttons – it was mind numbing work and they were troopers for doing it for so long. But all of them had bigger dreams and different skills that the company wasn’t utilizing because we had to execute weekly campaigns on behalf of clients.
A typical campaign included posting a blog post on the client’s website, promoting that post on Facebook & Instagram via organic posts, boosting those posts into ads and sending an email to the client’s database.
I realized that it was possible to manage all of that through a set of APIs, but we did not have any product or engineering resources to allocate to this initiative. Nobody was coming to help us – so it was on me to figure out how to solve this myself. I taught myself some basic Python back in 2019 and felt confident that I could string together enough Youtube videos & online tutorials to successfully accomplish the mission.
I got to work – moonlighting on nights and weekends as a Python programmer building a custom app. And 4 weeks later, we had a functioning v1 that accomplished everything we needed it to do. I spent the next few weeks working with the team to fine tune the functionality and train everyone up on the new processes.
But after just 8 weeks, our weekly inputs went from 200+ hours across 7 employees down to 15 hours across 2 employees. And the stats have continued to improve as we have worked through incremental improvements. We now have 1 employee who spends less than 8 hours per week on this program. And that does not change – no matter how many clients we execute for in a week.
As I have advanced in my career, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just what you get done, it’s HOW you get it done. If you can do more with the same resources or do the same work with fewer resources, the company is better than it was yesterday.
At heart, I’m a marketer. I love thinking about the customer journey and designing cohesive experiences to connect brands with their next customer. But that’s not my unique superpower.
What makes me unique is my technical background. I approach marketing with a highly analytical and technical lens. I’m a data guy. I nerd out on writing SQL queries to explore a dataset to try to uncover new insights that can lead to breakthroughs in our campaigns. And I love thinking about processes – and designing & implementing tools to help my teams do more of what excites them.
My ability to code solutions myself not only empowers my team when we don’t have engineering resources at our disposal, but it gives me a very unique perspective when we DO have engineers available. It allows me to collaborate very effectively with technical team members because I can speak that language and have experience doing that work myself.
That’s a unique skill set that has allowed me to continuously deliver excellent campaign results, while constantly helping the company improve our bottom line.
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