Making Your Own Way
Last December, I had the pleasure of joining Gio Petrucci and Renée Meloche as the featured guest in their podcast “Making Your Own Way”, part of their regular podcast series “Listen 2 Me.”
Our topic was: ‘What it takes to leave a desk job in a toxic workplace, even when it means giving up the regular paycheque you depend on’. This of course overlays with our ingrained belief that being on -staff in a fixed work environment is the key to professional success and a sense of self-worth.
We talked about my experience of walking away from my traditional corporate roles, going out on my own, and rebooting my career and my life in a way that would be much more fulfilling for me.
Let’s start at the beginning – when I was just a kid in a small town
I grew up in a small Ontario town, Kincardine – population 6000. As a small-town boy, I enjoyed camping and figure skating, and was lucky enough to have parents who took me with them on extensive travel through eastern Canada. This gave me a sense of how accessible the world could be. Inspired by this experience, I continued travelling on my own in high school – internationally – developed a love for it, and made travel a part of my business later in life.
However, in Kincardine, I was one of only four gay kids in my high school. I knew I couldn’t stay in my hometown, so I moved to Toronto when I was 19. Starting with a job at Guess Jeans, and ironically launched my advertising career serving coffee, changing tapes, and paying respondents at the focus group market research company, Ipsos Camelford Graham. This put me on the path to advertising!
The Toxic Life in “Adland”
Once I got my foot in the door at Ipsos, I did my first college co-op term working for them as a Research Assistant – looking at raw data, crunching numbers, creating Excel spreadsheets, etc. Two years and many cups of coffee later, I asked my VP for a reference to an advertising agency. It what I always wanted to do! At the age of 20, while still a student, I started an internship at the prestigious Leo Burnett, working to launch Hudson’s Bay’s Ashlee Simpson campaign, and created a teaser campaign for Five Alive that included custom ringtones (!) and urinal stickers. My glamorous advertising life had begun!
A few years into the game I started agency hopping, as people in the ad industry often do. In advertising it is one of the only ways to advance quickly and make a liveable wage early in your career. That said, I started calling around for my next gig.
Hyundai was starting an internal/external ad agency. I went there, fell into social media and started Hyundai Canada Auto’s Facebook page. We were the automotive sponsor of the International Federation of Association Football, FIFA (you may have heard of it). We launched an entire campaign in two months, bringing in 54K followers in the first month, and getting about 2 cumulative hours of sleep in the process. That said, living off of $30,000 per year and working 14 hours day resulting in my next leap; becoming a “social media expert”.
That experience catapulted me into social media and took me from traditional agencies to social media agencies. Their sometimes “irregular” practices and data tracking were an eye opener … One agency practiced viral seeding, where you create a fake account, and put paid content into the comment sections. I lasted a year and a half there before their fraudulent data reporting and misrepresented revenue numbers had me cut and run in the middle of the night. Literally.
At the height of my career in “Adland”, at the age of 25’, I was creating, staffing and managing a social media team in the global agency, TBWA\, with a staff of over 100 people. As the Adland tale goes, the agency lost some key clients and decided to cut back on staff. By 30%. After I had escalated homophobic behaviour on the part of our agency President, it was no surprise that my job eventually ended up on the cutting room floor with many others.
My next agency move from there was a similar story of high-expectations and a total lack of support. I transitioned to a Mobile App Development company, working about 100 hours per week servicing clients from Switzerland to California. Over nearly two years my management tripled my workload while cutting my team in half, expecting me to continue doing my job at full capacity while taking over the responsibilities of people they had let go. When I explained that this was not possible given my current level of responsibility, the response was… “Make it possible.”
What did I learn after 9 years of agencies kicking the shit out of me?
All of the management scale-backs, short-sightedness, homophobic micro- and macro-aggressions, and general emotion abuse, made me realize how little I was being valued.
How little senior management really cared about my contribution.
I began to disengage from my job. The light went out of my eyes. I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t work in this kind of environment anymore. These agencies were all bad, abusive, manipulative partners; like one bad boyfriend after another.
I needed to work for myself. Start my own business.
But I needed the mental space to do that. After talking to a coach and a therapist, I quit my agency job, and took some time off to think about what the next chapter in my career would look like. Once I found that clarity, I was ready to go out on my own.
Quitting my six-figure salaried job, and starting out on my own.
I began working as an independent marketing consultant for a year and a half. But I could only deliver strategy, and my clients needed someone who could execute all of their marketing tactics too.
I realized that if I had a brand that was separate from me, I could create an agency to deliver a suite of services to my clients in the areas of business growth planning, branding, marketing and communications.
So I started Snow Collective. A group of independent business owners working within a structure just like that of an ad agency. I’m my clients’ part-time/fractional Director of Marketing, which allows me to look after strategy and client relationship management.
I have built and now work with a team of folks who do specific things – business strategy, branding, web development, events, public relations, SEO, and the list goes on
I’ll meet with my client to discuss their goals, budgets, plans, aspirations and styles. Then I’ll put together a plan that encompasses all the tactics that my team can execute. It’s fun, it’s flexible, and it allows me to service my client in whatever way their business needs.
Why Snow Collective works
Having a collective structure means that I don’t have employee salaries and office overhead that each client has to pay for. I bring people in as I need them. I can provide seasoned experts without putting them on a retainer and charging my clients exorbitant amounts of money.
It’s an approach that works really well for my clients, my co-collaborators… and me. I’m able to choose different partners, depending on what’s needed on a particular job, and I have backup teams if and when I need them. We can all work from home, which lends itself well to today’s gig economy, especially during COVID.
And… Our projects keep getting bigger and snazzier. This tells me something is working!
Building on trust and mutual respect works. Building on ego does not.
In our collective, we work with a wide range of people. And it’s not about working all the time. We have fun. We play. We joke. We relate to each other on a personal level. Creative solutions come out of that play mentality. We have weekly Mastermind meetings within our group to account to one another. And we book social calls. It’s a collaborative, holistic structure.
People with talent come to work with us because we recognize their strengths and give them the opportunity do what they’re good at. That’s how we innovate. My job is to facilitate communication and support team members in what they do for a living – create. And that, in turn, is what’s going to make my clients successful.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of my career, it’s that it takes a culture of trust built on shared camaraderie to bring out the best in everyone.
Launching and running my business was ALL about my headspace and outlook.
For me, taking the right steps in reinventing my career was based on clarity. It came down to determining the kind of life I wanted to live. What I wanted my life to look like. And with the help of my coach, figuring out how to get there.
I learned along the way that I shouldn’t beat myself up all the time. I was so much kinder and more forgiving to others than to myself, and that had to change. I needed to trust that the things meant to come to me… will. And that I have the power to create it.
Working on my business and seeing it grow tells me I did the right thing.
If you can’t find the business and community you need – Create it.
I believe that the people we surround ourselves with will dictate our perspective and our ability to succeed. That said during COVID, it has been tough to find a space to connect with entrepreneurs in a meaningful way. So instead of finding a community, we created one.
We have a monthly Zoom call that I host, “Leadership Connect”, with typically about 25 business owners, decision makers, franchise owners and brokers joining the session. It’s all about peer mentoring – people coming together and sharing their challenges, success stories and tactics.
It's a place to discuss not only what tactics work or failed, but a space where we can share our thoughts, fears, celebrations, and come together for peer mentoring and support. It’s all about helping ourselves and each other. It is the crux of everything that we do – and if you’ve read this far and it piques your interest, feel free to read more about it here.
Let’s talk!
If you have a similar story to mine, whether you’re an Adland Abuse Recoveree, an unconventional and atypical business owner, whether you need marketing support, or just a sounding board on how to start your business – I’m here to talk.
Thanks for taking the time to learn my story. I’m excited to hear your story too.
For more information about Snow Collective, or to explore opportunities to collaborate with us, please feel free to:
Phone Dan at: 647.268.7766
Or
Email me at: dan@snowcollective.ca
Or
Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram