You’re running the business. You’re also picking the agencies, reviewing the copy, watching the ad spend at midnight, and trying to figure out if any of it is actually working. There’s no one in your building who can see the whole picture, so by default, you do.

I held both jobs for ten years. I started in marketing, in radio, digital advertising, and agency strategy, before I ever owned a business. Then I bootstrapped my own beauty brand from a brick-and-mortar shop into a national e-commerce business, doing all the marketing myself the whole way. I exited that brand with a system that finally worked.