(upbeat music) - You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and careers. Today, we're talking about the feeling you get when you're in over your head. And I'm curious, you guys, have you ever taken on like a new responsibility, a new team, or maybe someone left and you absorbed their role and you just felt immediately like a fish out of water?

Like what happened to you? How did you deal with it? And then what did you learn from your experience? - You wanna go first, Troy? - No, I think you should start this one off. - Okay, I'm happy to. I've definitely been in experiences where I've moved up a level or my scope has changed and expectations have changed.

I think though the experience that most reflected a sense of being really in over my head was when I started my own agency. And I started it with a couple of colleagues and there was a litany of things that I had never done before. I had been a copywriter and a freelancer at times for at that point, almost more than 20 years.

And so I'd worked at agencies. I worked in-house at large enterprises. I'd been an individual contributor. I'd been a manager. I'd been a director and a manager of managers. I'd been in part of the hiring and firing processes. But when you start your own business, and even though I had been a freelancer, I was more of like an individual contributor freelancer.

And when I engaged with businesses, it was on a, I gave them my social security number, not my employer identification number, which is different, your EID. So when I started an agency, number one, I had to set up an LLC, which was completely new for me. And my mom, who's an accountant, actually helped me out with that.

And she knew the ins and outs. She's like, well, you just contact this company and they're in, I'm in California. They're in Sacramento, which is the capital. And this is where you give them the information. They submit it, they walk the form over. So, but that was a bit of a hurdle, just understanding, not just getting the LLC information because I needed to then give it back to my first client.

And I would say, that's where I really felt like I was over my head, where I had gotten engagement at Uber that was working for one of their sort of sub businesses called Uber for Business. And I got an opportunity to start an agency because of a unique project that came about.

But I had to negotiate a rate. So the scope of the project was fairly large. It was refreshing their website. They were pivoting from a freemium to a premium model. They wanted a new website. They wanted new branding, a new sort of brand narrative. They wanted to do focus groups on the work.

So that by the time it went to market, it had been somewhat tested. They wanted a lot of stuff that I had been part of teams that had led projects of this type and they had been successful. So I felt like, well, I knew enough that I could feel confident about moving forward in that direction, but negotiating a rate and it was a blended rate, right?

So a rate for copywriting, for design, for production, for development, for focus group moderation, for analysis, for at some point along the line, once we had been hired for media planning. We also did brand strategy and brand narrative. All of this stuff, which I had kind of sort of done some part of over the course of my 20-year career, but I never led.

And when you're, you know, I finally was able to recruit a couple of colleagues, really talented people on the design side that I worked with as partners, but I was there negotiating the rate to get them in the door. Meaning, what was the blended rate gonna be? Was it $400 an hour?

Was it $200 an hour? Now, mind you, I'd never hired myself out as a freelancer for more than 80 or $90 an hour at the time. So it was a huge jump. And sort of just the process of figuring out how to do that required a lot of, I did a lot of research, frankly.

I talked to people. I read articles and books about what to do when you're running a digital marketing agency. And so I ended up negotiating this blended rate. And then I had to come up with a, I had to sign an MSA, a master services agreement, master service agreement with Uber.

And so that involved having the LLC and having insurance, which I had to get, business insurance. It was just a lot of things that I had never done before. And I felt like, and I was really stressed out about it, but it was always, it was such an exciting moment, I think, at the beginning for me, because it was all potential.

Like, I just said yes to everything and I dove into it. But if I sit back and think about it, I was way over my head. I had no idea what I, well, I had never done it before. And it's not that I had no idea what to do, but I think when you're in that position where you have an opportunity like that, and you're going for it, you need to be flexible.

In order to land on a rate that Uber could agree with, I had to do a lot of negotiations. There were weeks of negotiating back and forth with the primary stakeholder on the Uber side. And you have to be adaptable 'cause you're working with different people. There's different, there's like, stakeholders that have input, but not the decision.

And it's just a lot of that being flexible in the moment to the conditions that you're presented with and having to then adapt. And I think, you know, as a creative, I'd never really, even though I'd manage people, managing people and running a business is totally different. So I'm just describing like some of the things, but then there's the business planning, there's the hiring and firing, there's the accounting side of it.

There's eventually, we got a fourth partner who did all the financial planning and it's like the line item, cash flow, all that stuff. And yeah, if I sat back at any one point to think about all the things that I had to accomplish to get that business afloat and then keep it going, I was way over my head.

Like I had no experience doing that stuff, but I learned by doing and I learned a lot. - Were you ever afraid, Jesse, that you would be exposed, you know, for not being the expert that your rate supposed to justify, right? So you negotiated blended rate. It assumes you have expertise, but obviously you know that you're in a degree kind of putting yourself out there, maybe overselling and kind of growing in a process.

Like, was there ever like a fear that you wouldn't be able to meet the expectation or was that pressure added to yourself? - Of course, yeah. I think if I said I wasn't afraid, if anyone said, you know, no, I had no fear when presented with an opportunity that I didn't really have experience with and therefore didn't have maybe the confidence or the experience of going through something successfully or even unsuccessfully.

So yeah, there was a lot of fear, but you know what? I learned to rely on other people. When they asked me for a media plan, I went out and got a media planner. When they asked me for, I think video production at one time, we went out and got a video production person.

When they asked for brand strategy, I did as much as I could, but I brought in an expert to look at my work. You know, I produced a brand narrative before I presented to the client. On the side, I sent it out to someone I knew in the brand strategy world who could help me refine it.

Then once I had that first client and then we were operating as business, there was three of us, in order to get more business, I worked through my network. So everyone that I worked with initially knew me. I wasn't over-promising. They knew my history. It wasn't until a few months had gone by that we started bringing in clients that didn't know us at all.

And they were often startups who looked to our experience with, you know, as contributors or managers at larger corporations like Google and other places. And so that gave us credibility, gave me credibility, I think. You know, often I was the one doing the business development, meaning getting those new clients, like talking to them up, talking them up about our offer and our promise and what we could do.

So certainly the fear motivated me to search for answers, you know, and be flexible and in a way that was accelerated. Like I wasn't waiting around to make a decision. You know, if a client called me up and we had been engaged for a little while and they said, there was one client that they engaged with us to do a full-scale content marketing operation.

So it meant they were launching this business, they wanted to produce all this content to get credibility, but they had no positioning. So all of a sudden they wanted a brand positioning playbook. And I reached out to another colleague who ran specifically a brand branding agency and I got a playbook, like a template that I could use to then go into a workshop to get my new client to a place where they had a starting point in terms of positioning.

And I had enough information and I had enough information and I brought in one of the people at this other agency to help guide us through that process. So, you know, there's always a sense that I could go and find somebody that had more expertise than I had. And I think that was really critical to know sort of how much I knew where the limits of my knowledge was and what I needed to ask, you know, for support.

And there's a lot of people in the marketing community that are willing to help, especially if you're willing to pay them some amount of money. So, or, you know, even if you just need an ear, I think our business is very competitive and certainly the agency business is exceptionally competitive and you have a lot of talented creatives and strategists and planners that can really help businesses that often in Silicon Valley anyway, you see lots of startups with engineering or some kind of technical expertise that their founders bring to the table, but very little marketing expertise.

And so they're really, really desperate for someone to understand how to tell their story and bring it to market in a cohesive, consistent way. So it's amazing, I think, how after a few years as a marketer, how much expertise and experience you have compared to the rest of the world, the business world.

And I think what I would say to people that are starting out that maybe haven't done anything on their own, whether it's a freelance thing or more of a collective effort, like a small agency is you have experience, some years of experience, and it's given you some level of expertise.

That's your shingle, right? That's the thing you put out on the door. And should you talk to anyone and let them know they might be interested, they spread the word, like these things just kind of get momentum on their own, I think. And the other thing I would say is as you're learning to deal with things that are way over your head that maybe you've never done before, and you're scared, you develop a narrative.

Like the way I'm being able to talk about this process, I think is invaluable when you're going out to pitch for new business, or you just, like I'm doing now, being a consultant, and I wanna talk to not just potential clients, but current clients that wanna understand how to solve problems.

Like I can bring that confidence and that the experience I have is forms a narrative that, you know, isn't just a straight line. It's yeah, there's challenges, there's peaks and valleys, but you get, this is how you get through that. It's been invaluable. I think to be over my head and to be challenged has been an invaluable experience.

- There's an element of Jesse, what Jesse was saying there that brought to mind a couple of my favorite or least favorite expressions that you hear often around the workplace, especially in sort of small business, startup land. One is fake it until you make it. And the other is act like you've been there before.

And I think Jesse's sort of concluding points are, you know, you don't need to fake who you are as a whole. You need to focus in on what your strengths are and get help around the periphery, right? 'Cause you're, even if you're feeling like you're in over your head, you're there for a reason and you need to remember what those reasons are.

That doesn't mean you know everything about everything and you never will, but you can, there's resources to sort of fill in the blanks and nobody would expect you, or Jesse in this case, to know everything about running an agency right at the start, right? But they hired him for his experiences and his, you know, the sort of the core, you know, experience and talents that he had.

So my story is a little bit different. I was at Logitech and you guys both knew me, I think in the gaming role. And that was, I didn't start in gaming. I started in the corporate marketing and the public relations team. I was a communications guy by background and had a desire at a certain point to get closer to the product because product marketing always fascinated me.

So I was talking with the gaming guys, a lot of them were my friends and they had a, they were looking for a game developer relations manager to start. And what they liked in me was that I had experience with relationships and in doing public relations and media relations and specifically.

And so partner, you know, partner marketing was, they were looking for with, you know, some of the big game publishers and game developers was not too far removed from the kind of work I'd done with, you know, public relations in the past. And they liked my writing ability because they wanted to do, you know, targeted newsletters to keep developers up to date on, you know, what was happening in that realm.

But I felt completely off my skis when it came to gaming. I was not a gamer. Yeah, I'm a very casual gamer, you might say, but I knew nothing about the world of, you know, MMOs and World of Warcraft and first person shooters. And that was not my forte.

And it was, I often felt like I was in over my head, but every time I did, I would try to bring myself back to like, you know, I'm offering something that's a little bit different as a complimentary piece to this group. And these guys that I work with are classic hardcore gamers, right?

So they've got that piece taken care of. I just need to focus on what I do well and add that layer to what they're doing. But I would urge everybody if they, to cringe a little bit, if they ever hear "fake it till you make it." It's good to have confidence.

It's good to believe that you can problem solve and fix things maybe that you haven't seen before. But never, I would say, never misrepresent who you are and what your experiences are. Trying to jump in and do it yourself and maybe make a mess of things. - I would just add, you know, there's something you said at the end there, Troy, about confidence and belief.

And there's a difference between believing and doing. You know, I can believe I'm an incredible chef, but ask me how to make a incredible meal. And I can't break down the steps 'cause I actually don't know how to do it. I'm not a very good cook. I wouldn't know how to tell you to, I can boil water and things like that.

And I think that the trick is, especially, and I think in our culture and maybe in the business culture at large, there's a real emphasis on confidence and belief. Believe in yourself, things will come true. Believe in the three steps to success, they'll come true. But there's a different type of knowledge and that's the knowledge of the process to get to those things.

And so if you ask me, how do I, Jesse, how do you build a content marketing program that is effective over a 12-month period? I can break it down into the steps. Well, first you wanna take a look at how you're doing now and audit your current library and its performance.

And you wanna look at the market and the competition to see what the topics are, the trends in the market and look at your product roadmap. And there's all these steps to developing a plan that is very different from the belief that I can develop a plan. And I think often, especially on social media sites like LinkedIn, there's an overemphasis in belief over the knowledge of actually how the process of something works.

And that second type of knowledge is often much more important than the first one. Although I think, yeah, fake it till you make it. I don't love that. I think I'd like to say, know your limits. Know your limits and know when you need help. You know, and I think that's maybe a more realistic way to approach things.

I think if you take on something and you promise to do something you can't do, you're likely to be frustrated and frustrate other people as well. - Yeah, I really agree. As a matter of fact, my example is almost the opposite of you guys where I knew my limits and I had to intentionally retract.

So like you guys, most of my times were the fake it to make it or feeling in over your head. Usually happens for me like when I get promoted a level, right, my responsibilities increase or whatnot. And for the most part, because, you know, our skillsets as we get older, they become more broad and deep just 'cause you're able to expose more stuff.

I'm usually able to mask my deficiencies and quickly and read up and get smart about it. My last role at A10 Networks didn't pan out the same way because, you know, for me, I'm a web marketer. Digital marketing is a different skillset. Now, web marketing is about, you know, pushing out content to prospect customers and trying to build the best experience to get them to engage, right?

Now, digital marketing with paid is different. It's typically a demand general, right? And so I've been involved with search engine marketing and I've owned that as a discipline or whatnot, but the broader field of demand generation, I've never run. Now, I've sat very closely to sales and demand gen and channel that made me believe that if I were to take on demand gen right away, I could do it successfully from the ground, hit the ground running.

And so when I went to A10 Networks, I was hired to run both demand gen and web marketing. Where I started to feel pressure immediately was, and this is what I'm about to say is not necessarily just related to A10, but I think most companies can relate to this, which is a lot of times, like your ability to execute or make decisions is only as good as the data in front of you.

If you have bad data hygiene, it's really hard to make well-informed decisions, right? And so in this world, it was both a data hygiene issue where if I'm trying to understand my segments and understand where the opportunities are or how to measure, the data wasn't clean. You pair that with cultural differences where demand gen, how it was maybe previously run or who was heavily influenced decisions, and that differs by organization.

Sometimes the executive leadership has very high influence and they're in the weeds. Sometimes it's hands-off completely, right? And in this case, the reputation of demand gen and how it worked with product marketing, I would describe it as not the healthiest. And so the influence or expectations often were met with unrealistic expectations.

And so I came into a situation where I had to run demand gen and a lot of the pipeline work and upstream workflows were not ideal. And I was not equipped to fix that. Now, I came in, I was able to identify some gaps, you know, like I'm looking at the funnel, I can tell where the leaky bucket was in the data and I absolutely fix some things, but there truly is a strategic element where you have to understand at a company initiative level what your CEO is going for.

And you have to know the product well enough to discern if what the marketing leadership is pushing for is different, right? And then you need to break it down by the regents and NGOs and how are they all interpreting a mission. And all of this, if they're not aligned, it becomes really hard to execute tactically on things like campaign kits or whatnot.

And so I had never been exposed to that up-level stream as it pertains to demand gen. I've only seen execution. And so I was very unequipped and the team was really, really lean, which means you're a player coach. And so I quickly immediately felt over my head 'cause I had never had execute either.

And so the areas that I was focused on optimizing, like some of those campaigns turned really, really well, but solving for a campaign is different than solving for a broader company strategy. And I'll describe it as, I was focused on solving a $50,000 problem when I was ignoring the million, right?

'Cause I just didn't have the expertise. And so by focusing all of my attention on that, my other half of my responsibility, which is web marketing, was basically ignored, right? And there's a lot of things that that team need to do. And also it was a very lean team.

They were awesome at what they did, but they still needed a leadership. That's what I was hired for. And so two months into my job, I would say my focus is like 90% on demand gen, of which I was probably only 50% efficient or effective and only 10% on web.

And so none of the things under my purview were succeeding well. And my inability to understand demand gen was confusing the demand gen team. So I wasn't doing anyone a service. And so I ended up going to my VP and I said, "Look, man, I know you hired me to do these things and I'm working my damnedest to get it done.

It's only been a one quarter engagement so far and I'm not doing well." And to your point earlier, you guys, about knowing your limits, I knew my limits. I had no way to bring in extra help. And the help that I had or that the resources, they didn't have enough experience to solve the strategic gaps I was missing.

So there was no nothing, thumbs up from Zoom. There was nothing for me to pull from, right? And so that conversation was interesting. I was like, I was mentally ready to get let go. I was mentally ready to get demoted. And that's what I expected to happen. And so in the end, thankfully, I was not removed from my position, but I did get my role divided, right?

And the learning point for that was how do you exit a role gracefully? So I took all my observations that were true and presented them to the VP to help them understand, "Hey, look, for anyone stepping into this job, here are the things that they need to be aware of that I wish I knew before I took this job, or otherwise I might not have taken it." And that helps set them up to identify the next replacement, right?

So yeah, that was my experience being over my head. And I just wanna share that one 'cause like you guys, most of the other ones I was able to power through, but that's one where I had to wave the white flag and I had to figure out a way to do that.

How you position yourself and provide a plan forward is a difference between, I guess, retracting and having a positive outcome rather than retracting and leaving it, like the control out of our hands, right? So I feel like I had a little more control over my destiny by handling it that way.

So I've already kind of put a wrap on this particular conversation. I think we all agree. And like, first of all, acknowledge that in any situation, you bring value, you are hired to do that role 'cause you're experienced. And so lean into it. But as you're doing that and you're growing and growing is a natural part of our jobs, know your limits and pull in help when you need to, right?

And whether that's through external help or maybe even setting your scope appropriately when you realize you're hitting something that's kind of come out of your purview. But know that there's so many resources out there for you and don't wait until you're drowning in a deep end before you decide to call for help.

Hey guys, thanks again for watching and listening. Next week, we'll be talking about how to deal with imposter syndrome. So make sure you hit like, subscribe and the notification bell so you don't miss the episode.