Equiturn is a business solutions firm whose clients ranged from startups to nine-figure enterprises, and every one of them needed marketing that worked immediately. I ran the marketing department for all of them, which meant a different industry and a different set of problems most weeks.
The scope of the role
At the peak I had twenty-five client accounts running at once, and I took every meeting on all of them myself. That stretch ran at eighty to ninety hours a week.
On the paid side I ran PPC across every Google format and optimized it daily, because a monthly check is how you lose an account. I built the tracking in Tag Manager so the numbers meant something, and I produced monthly executive decks out of Data Studio that a CFO could act on. Underneath that sat the keyword research, the competitor research, and the bid strategy, which usually told me something was underperforming before the client noticed.
Beyond the ad accounts, I handled brand development and the design work on the web properties, along with PR and social. I trained the new hires and interns in design and content, and I was the marketing representative on government contracts, which come with their own kind of paperwork.
Some of the client work
Clients came from industries with almost nothing in common. Close to forty brands came through in three years, from medicine to consumer products, and no single house style would have worked for all of them. Scimera Bioscience and Phoenix Global International were on the list, along with Evolving Minds Together and The EPIC Foundation, a South Florida education nonprofit. Charged Ventures, a pre-seed incubator, was on it as well.
Some of it was identity work from scratch. For Toys Tonight in Miami I built the whole brand, starting with the logo and running through everything that carried it, and we flew to California to shoot their commercial. Equiturn's own brand was an account too, so its logo, its website, and the search and paid programs behind them were mine to build.
One account went further than brand work. I was interim CMO at TLC Travel Staff and held that seat through a six-way merger that our team ran from start to finish, bringing TLC together with Lighthouse, Mynela, Nurse 2 Nurse, Rad-Link, and Day 2 Day. We helped form MedStaff Holdings out of all six. Each company needed an identity that could stand on its own and still read as part of the same group.
I also produced the quarterly Haig Report, which was picked up by Yahoo Money and MarketWatch.
What this chapter added
Running that many accounts is what made me trade a house style for a method. What works for a nonprofit chasing donors does not work for a quarterly corporate report, and holding both in the same week forces you to build an approach that transfers between them.
These were rarely large media budgets. On most accounts efficiency mattered more than reach, so I learned to read cost per acquisition before anything else and to treat daily optimization as the job itself. Every marketing role I have taken since has been a narrower version of this one.