For nearly seven years I worked in a digital marketing agency that was constantly launching new initiatives. We figured hey, if we can make websites take off for clients, why couldn’t we do it ourselves?
And so began a road full of new projects, launches, designs, growth phases, and ultimately a persistent startup culture. When one website seemed to be hitting its stride, we’d launch another one after that.
All while juggling a roster of clients.
As I officially hit my year anniversary working for a much larger tech company – quite the opposite experience of my scrappy startup life – I can’t help but reflect on how different life has been since leaving, and some of the things I’ve learned to appreciate along the way.
Here are a few.
Table of Contents
- #1. Operate from a customer service perspective
- #2. Stay up to date on your industry
- #3. Prioritize work-life balance
- #4. Be Scrappy
#1. Operate from a customer service perspective
Startup culture is known for a lot of great (and not-so-great) things; one such thing is typically a low user base. Whether that’s actual customers if you’re selling a product, or even just website visitors if you’re a content marketing site, fresh projects typically have to build up their audience.
In my experience with e-commerce projects, quality customer service is absolutely vital to the initial growth period.
Why?
If you don’t have many customers, then every customer you do have matters just a bit more. If you leave a lasting first impression on a customer, then there’s a higher chance you’ll be rewarded with additional business for it.
There’s definitely an incentive to make every interaction with your customer count.
The same is true when it comes to working in-house too; here’s the secret: your customers are still there, they’re just called stakeholders now, and they work for the same company you do.
I’ve seen colleagues fall prey to forgetting this concept, asking stakeholders to make SEO requests in meticulous formats that only truly make sense to the people already in the know.
We don’t assume our customers in a startup are familiar with our methods, industry, and jargon; why would you do that with stakeholders?
Make it your mission to help the person that came to you for help. They wanted your expertise, clearly, or they would have done it themselves otherwise. That’s a good thing – you’re needed!
In addition to making it your mission to help them, make it easy for them to get help too. If they don’t quite know what they’re asking for, but you do and can provide it, that’s an opportunity to use your expertise and knowledge to go above and beyond.
Treating the folks that ask for help – from SEO to marketing in general – like customers offers you a few different benefits:
- You’ll be satisfied when they’re satisfied
- They’ll enjoy their experience working with you
- The end result will probably be better
- They’ll probably want to work together again in the future
In a startup this would be automatic behavior thanks to the importance of every customer. Outside of a startup, it’s absolutely an advantage in the long run.
#2. Stay up to date on your industry
Startup culture is all about doing a lot with just a little, most times.
Case in point, in my startup days, I worked on:
- PPC
- Facebook Ads
- Email newsletters
- Website development
- Organic SEO
- Content production
- Affiliate marketing & relationship management
- Ad network marketing and display
…and so on. Me. One person. I wore a lot of hats – and that’s not an uncommon story to hear when you’re talking to people working in startups.
Because I wore so many hats and had so many different responsibilities, I really had to put in the effort to stay up to date on the latest trends in as many of these verticals as I could. Failure to stay up to date would result in the failure of our project, and that would rest on my shoulders.
So I made it a habit to spend a little bit of time each day specifically perusing news sources that wrote on these digital marketing subjects. I even subscribed to a few newsletters along the way to get summaries sent my way.
(On that note, SEOs, the Marie Haynes newsletter has been tremendously valuable and very much worth the cost.)
Working in-house for a larger enterprise, you’ll find things are a bit more compartmentalized. You’ve got the digital side of the marketing team broken down into specific silos that focus almost exclusively on some of those tasks mentioned above.
Because of that, it’s easy to either:
A) Accidentally narrow your focus too much on your specific niche
or
B) Go with the flow of your team, and not be quite as proactive or hungry to be as up-to-date on the latest developments
Don’t let either of those happen!
While I’m not necessarily scrambling to learn an unsustainable number of skills at once these days, I am making a point to make sure I’m staying up to date on the latest developments in my field.
#3. Prioritize work-life balance
As anyone who’s worked in a startup before can probably tell you, the hustle-and-grind culture is… exhausting.
There, I said it.
60+ hour work weeks with weekends thrown in as needed isn’t really all that sustainable mentally if you’d like to also have a social life, time with family, hobbies, or a whole lot else outside of work.
During my time at the agency, where we dove neck-deep into startup culture as a way of existence, I rarely took PTO. I worked long hours every day. I did a terrible job of leaving work at work, and was that guy interrupting dinners to check my phone when work emails would come in.
Why?
Now that I work for a much larger company with a bigger emphasis on work-life balance, managers that constantly remind me to take time off, and colleagues that understand the end of the workday means the end of the workday, I find myself wishing I had this during my agency days.
Sure I may have finished up a few projects later than I would have without the nighttime crunching, but what could I have done with that time?
At the very least, I could have started work the next day a little bit more recharged having had some more time to myself the night before.
In this case, startup culture taught me what not to do. Keep this lesson in mind if you’re able to. Work’s going to be there the next day, and you can’t get that time outside of it back once it passes.
#4. Be Scrappy
Probably the biggest and best lesson I’ll take with me from my time working in startups: being scrappy.
My boss used to joke that we were a pirate ship, just our scrappy little venture setting sail against all odds to create digital properties while juggling client rosters and exploring new frontiers.
While that might sound like a convincing sales pitch, there was truth to it.
So many days, maybe a majority of them even, were spent trying to figure out newer and better ways to do things I’d never done before. We knew what needed to be done, but we didn’t know how to do it – and that wasn’t allowed to stop us.
We had limited means to pull off what we needed to pull off, but that wasn’t an acceptable excuse not to try.
That mentality, and the need to sometimes get down in the weeds to make things happen gave me a skillset that’ll help me for the rest of my life.
Being scrappy teaches you to not accept arbitrary reasons not to do something.
It makes you cringe at the idea of a minor roadblock that you could clear, but for some reason aren’t allowed to.
It frustrates you to spend more time thinking about how you could do something instead of just doing it.
It helps you become more of a right-now doer, not a maybe someday doer.
I love my current job, but I was thrown off at first by how wildly different the culture was compared to where I came from. Despite that, I’ve still kept that bit of scrappiness I’ve learned to hold onto and embrace. It hasn’t stopped helping me yet, and I don’t imagine it ever will.
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