Equiturn is a business solutions firm whose clients ranged from startups to nine-figure enterprises and every one of them needed marketing that worked yesterday. I ran the marketing department for all of it, 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, and it is the closest thing to a trial by fire I have had in this industry.
On the paid side I ran PPC across every Google format, optimized daily rather than monthly, because monthly is how you lose an account. I built the tracking architecture in Tag Manager so the numbers meant something and produced monthly executive decks out of Data Studio that a CFO could actually act on. Underneath that sat the keyword and competitor research and the bid strategy, and between them they usually told me something was underperforming before the client noticed.
Beyond the ad accounts I carried 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 rep on government contracts (its own special 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, spanning medicine and law and staffing and consumer products, which is why no house style would have survived contact with all of them. Scimera Bioscience and Phoenix Global International were on it, and so were Evolving Minds Together and a South Florida education nonprofit called The EPIC Foundation. Charged Ventures ran a pre-seed incubator and sat on the book alongside them.
Some of it was identity work from scratch. For Toys Tonight in Miami I built the entire brand, starting with the logo and running through everything that carried it, and we flew out to California to shoot their commercial. Equiturn's own brand was an account too, which meant its logo and its site and the search and paid programs behind them were all mine to build.
One account went a good deal further than brand work. I sat as interim CMO at TLC Travel Staff and held that seat through a six-way merger our team ran end to end, bringing TLC together with Lighthouse, Mynela, Nurse 2 Nurse, Rad-Link and Day 2 Day. We helped form MedStaff Holdings out of all six, and every one of them 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 got picked up by Yahoo Money and MarketWatch.
What this chapter added
Running a book that size is what made me stop having a house style and start having a method. What works for a nonprofit chasing donors is not what works for a quarterly corporate report, and holding both in the same week forces you to build something that transfers between them.
These were rarely large media budgets. On most of the 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 rather than a refinement of it. Every marketing role I have taken since has been a narrower version of this one.