To save you the TED talk introduction, I’m Matej, a 3-month fresh recruit at Lean, and here’s my story:
When I first stepped into the office I had little experience in the vast realm of digital marketing. To be frank, I didn’t even realize just how vast it really was. What I did know though was that I was going in headfirst…
Because I love persuasion.
I often bore people to death trying to sell them some “idea” in most of my daily conversations. But what can I do? It’s just how I was wired. Even though I loved the art of persuasion, I never had a career out of it. I did have a short stint in university where I sold insurance and investment funds but that got old quickly. I also used to play video games competitively, and my latest stint being a nutrition/fitness coach. But then…
I saw a copywriting job post on LinkedIn, and everything changed.
“What in the hell is copywriting anyway?” Copyright-ing? It can’t be, it seems to be about writing ads, landing pages, emails… and down the wormhole I went. I started researching the great copywriters like Ogilvy, Eugene Schwarz and Joe Sugarman. Reading every single book I could get my hands on, and I even started writing copy for imaginary companies because I couldn’t get a copywriting gig on Upwork to save my life.
“Copy readers will never understand what it is to be a copywriter”.
Point is, I want to get sh*t done right. But like all newbies, I struggled massively, had no team to help me, so I knew that the fastest way to become good is to find the best people and work alongside them. And now the fun part…
Lean enters the picture.
This was a few months after I discovered copywriting, and I didn’t really have any experience with it because I didn’t even get the copywriting job, and had just 3 gigs on Upwork (I did apply though– because I’m a headfirst type of guy remember?).
After somehow going through the interview process smoothly, my final step was a coffee meetup with the CEO Gabriela Lazova. And since I had nothing to lose I decided to ignore all conventional advice on what to do on interviews, so I was completely transparent about my skills and mindset, and in a way I was “testing” the market. And then…
She said something that changed the trajectory of my career completely.
“I see a lot of myself in you, and I think you’d do even better being an account lead, the orchestrator of all the countless moving parts that encompass the growth of a company. An account lead needs to be the one moving the needle, and I believe you can do that”. In the words of Seth Godin, I could become:
An Ambassador of Change.
“F*ck yes!”
“I know you don’t have experience, don’t worry, I believe you’ll be able to manage your own clients in 3 or 4 months”
Terror started to set in… My. own. clients? LOL. I didn’t even know what CPL or CTR was. “I will be exposed”, “I’ll get fired in a month” or “I suck” were thoughts constantly circulating in my mind, but there was one thing I wasn’t going to let happen:
LET THOSE THOUGHTS PARALYZE ME.
Keep that in caps. Because that singular thought was and still is getting me through the growing pains. What’s more, throughout life I’ve observed the most insecure people excelling the most. If you think you suck, you try to get better. Or at least that’s what I’m doing, and it seems to be going well.
But here’s the really fun part–if you have the right people around you, it really makes this process a hell of a lot easier. And I can say with an absolute degree of certainty that Lean has those people. People that will go out of their way to help you out. People that don’t hoard their know-how, but instead cherish the opportunity to go share it. Now this sounds nice and all but when you’re just starting out and you offer nothing in return, it can be hard to ask these questions, and I certainly was that guy–struggling with a problem for hours, determined to do it on my own and not look stupid, when I could’ve done it in 10 mins had I asked someone for help.
But it’s all only a part of the process.
After all, “success is not final, and failure is definitely not fatal”. Now I’m responsible for the growth of four clients, with responsibilities depending on their size and budget. Don’t get me wrong, we always work within a team but for smaller clients I get an almost unlimited amount of autonomy to decide the best course of action. And if you like being autonomous and feeling like you matter…
You’ll love it here.
To sum up, I get up each and every day to solve problems, ask questions, with the triangular goal (I made this term up) to pursue excellence, provide value for clients and my colleagues–and everything else falls into place. I can confidently say that my quality of life has increased dramatically since I’ve started working in Lean. Actually, just now, as I’m writing this, I’m starting to understand what the biggest benefit of working here for me has been:
My life just got better.
And before I roll the paper out the typewriter, I’ll throw a marketing 101 your way–a Call-to-Action.
If my story struck a chord, what the hell are you waiting for? It’s not like we don’t have a heap of applicants at our doorstep, so hurry up!
