We Wear a Lot of Hats
I got dressed as ten different people this week. Cheaper than hiring them, considerably worse results. Now I know you are wondering if I actually played a round of role reversal with myself; don’t stress, it hasn’t gone that far. Yet!
The hats started as an idea for a photo. They turned into something I’ve been chewing over for months, because that is genuinely what it all feels like at the moment. There are so many of them now, I can picture the actual hat stand.
The Business Owner Top Hat.
The Private Life Panama.
The Financial Fedora.
The one where you also do your own marketing. (It reads like a cut episode of Friends). Once you give one hat your undivided attention, the rest tend to topple over.
Life is demanding for a lot of us, and not enough people voice how far behind it makes you feel. It got me thinking about my marketing manager years, long before any of this, when I had a job title that meant one thing on paper and about ten things in practice.
20 Specialists, One Salary
The KPIs, the reporting, the Monday morning ask for numbers. Ads, social media, email, design, copy, the website, events, PR, analytics and strategy, all sitting with one person who was expected to be excellent at every single one of them.
Now don’t get me wrong, one person can be good at many things. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Just because someone is an ads expert doesn’t qualify them as a social media guru.
Each hat comes with its own laundry list of skills and instincts. Someone who is knee-deep in an ads account eight hours a day won’t have the time to catch up on Meta’s new change or whatever Instagram quietly changed about the algorithm this week.
In short, a designer who can count does not an analyst make. And some of the best strategic thinkers I know would think you are quoting a menu when the conversation turns to Mint Mojito and Candy Floss. We creative types know that just means green and pink.
None of this is meant to be a criticism. It is just a straight-up fact. We have somehow decided marketing is one job when it is closer to fifteen, all moving at different speeds, all changing while you were busy with the other fourteen.
A very famous saying goes: “a jack of all trades and master of none.” This simply means you’re doing everything and doing it worse than someone who lives and breathes just one of those things every day.
It Was Never That I Couldn’t Do It
This is the part I want to be clear about. I could design whatever you needed, if you gave me three hours to think about it and twenty minutes for an unscheduled panic attack before the first click even hit the page. Meanwhile, the work I was actually good at didn’t budge at all.
Time and skill set work better when people stick to what they’re actually good at. Having people around you who cover the rest is the whole game.
What I Did in 2015
I stopped trying to be the entire department. I surrounded myself with experts instead. What a relief it was. The pressure came off, the work got sharper, clients got the best of us, and I stopped going home with the ghost of deadlines past.
This year is no different. Except this time, it’s not the business I’m building a team around; it’s me. Coaches. Better software. Extending the team so the load sits across more shoulders instead of just mine.
And I tell you what, it works.
I am making better decisions because I am not pouring from an empty cup. If you take one thing from this, let it be that. You are not supposed to carry it on your own, business or otherwise. The people who look like they have it all handled are almost always the ones who stopped trying to control every little thing themselves.
Which Is Why Website Doctors Is Built the Way It Is
We are a team built on skill. A team that has shared a space for years, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We know by heart who will gel with a new client, who will understand the brand, its customers, and the person running it.
Together we are stronger, and that is one of the truest lessons I have learned in over 20 years of doing this.
We offer our clients an outsourced marketing department in whatever capacity suits them. It can be for a day or a week; either way, they get a group of specialists, each with their own hat. Not one person doing a juggling act.
You are never just a number to us. We know our clients, we know their businesses, and we know when something is working and when it isn’t.
If you’re wearing every hat and something is always slipping, that’s not a “you” problem; it’s a workload problem, and a fixable one. Come and have a chat with us about which hats you could hand over.
