The things of which I’m most proud
Before speaking at our recent conference, the MC (Hannah) asked me to answer some questions to make the intro more personal. One of the questions was:
What are you most proud of in your professional career?
It’s a great question; it challenges you to come up with something that’s somehow hard, exciting, and worthwhile.
I thought for a long time.
In the end, my answer was:
I’m most proud of the fact that all of Distilled’s best work was done by other people.
And it’s true — the team I’ve had the privilege to hire, grow, and work with is easily my biggest professional achievement.
I’ve given some decent presentations, but other people have scored higher. I’ve done some pretty cool client work, but other people have had a bigger impact. I’ve been excited about creative content, and luckily other people have been good at actually producing it.
Creative content is a very concrete example that we can easily show off. For the avoidance of doubt, I didn’t design or build any of these:
If you had told Duncan and me ten years ago that our company would be responsible for getting our clients coverage in all these places we would have looked at you like you were crazy. If you had said we’d do it with beautifully-designed campaigns and creative content, we’d have known you were crazy. You see, we hadn’t discovered the magic of hiring people at that point — specifically the magic of hiring people who are better than you.
It’s not just creative content though
It’s the top-rated conference talks I didn’t give. But the team did.
It’s the resources that are referenced by everyone around the industry that I didn’t write. But the team did.
It’s the major retailer that generates millions in sales on advice I didn’t give. But the team did.
Weirdly, it’s also the alumni who got their jobs as a result of the reputation they built at Distilled.
I’m proud of our alumni
I suspect that when I finally hang up my keyboard, the careers we kickstarted will be something I look back on with joy.
Like any founder, I’ve experienced every grieving emotion when great people have left Distilled. But in recent times, I’ve gone past acceptance to seeing the “lifecycle” as a fundamental part of Distilled. We have repeatedly taken people on who were talented but unknown, and given them the tools and platform to find their voice. You know these people— you’ve seen them break out to speak on the biggest stages, and take on the biggest roles in our industry. Some of them stay and repeatedly grow with Distilled and become a part of our enduring narrative — and some of them head out to be the digital native CMOs of tomorrow, or the founders of their own ventures.
Either way, I’m judging myself on how many people at Distilled can say “this is the best job I’ve ever had”, and whether people who leave can say that their time at Distilled played a critical role in their future success.
So yeah, it still upsets me if someone leaves Distilled without taking a big step up in their career. But when people use our platform to get a bigger job than they could have otherwise, then go on to take over the world, I’ll be there for the rest of their career cheering on the sidelines and helping where I can behind the scenes.
Watch out for our rising stars
The talent in the team members coming up through the ranks is phenomenal. So I encourage you to keep up with their writing and see them speak anywhere you can. Then in a couple of years you can say that you knew them before they were famous.
And if you think some of it looks raw, just go back and find the early work from the people who went on to be great (where are the early Whiteboard Friday videos, moz team?). We all need to put in our 10,000 hours.
Come work with us
We have bold plans to reshape how marketing is done. So if you are looking for a partner to help you figure out how to take control of your digital destiny, check out what we can do below. And if you think that Distilled sounds like the kind of place you could thrive, we should talk. We’re based in three of the best cities in the world, London, NYC, Seattle — look how beautiful they are:
The work we do — five main areas
- Platform — the technical details can make or break a digital campaign, and some of our most impactful work is still technical SEO and other platform improvements.
- Content — the platform is nothing without the interesting, engaging, useful, shareable content to fill it out. We consult on content strategy and content marketing, and we get hands-on to build the 10x content that spearheads campaigns.
- Audience — over the last decade in the digital marketing business, the biggest lesson we’ve learned (and relearned) is that your audience development plan is your digital marketing plan. How are you going to reach the right people? Why will they care? Can you build an audience flywheel over time of people returning to your site again and again? We consult in this area, and we execute both organic promotion campaigns (PR and outreach) and paid campaigns throughout the funnel from social content promotion at the top to retargeting and paid search at the bottom.
- Conversion — everything needs a point, and for our campaigns, that point is driving conversions. From micro-conversions like engagement, sharing, links, and email sign-ups through to macro-conversions when money changes hands, we test, iterate, and learn.
- Measurement — if you don’t take advantage of all the data generated by every digital interaction, you’ll be beaten by someone who does. If you unthinkingly allow data to drive every decision, you’ll lose your creativity and humanity. We strive for data aware decision-making. Gather the data, use it as an input in your process, then make the bold decisions.
So, if you want the results for your company to be in my next things of which I’m most proud post, please get in touch and let’s have a chat:
