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Monkey See… I Asked a Stranger How To Do My Job
Ella Persson
Head of Creative
In May I was given a job title bigger than anything I had done before, and a remit to match: marketing, branding, socials, the whole visual side of two sister companies, and the customer journey running through all of it. All that in four days a week. I said yes immediately, which is what I do when something sounds exciting and I have not yet done the arithmetic.
A new role fits like a coat bought for someone slightly taller. It is a good coat. I can see why it was chosen. I am also aware, moving around in it, that my hands have disappeared somewhere up the sleeves.
For the last few years I ran my own studio, building websites and teaching small business owners how to show up online. Everything was mine: the work, the mistakes, the pricing, the deciding. What I got good at was doing. What this role wants is deciding what gets done, by whom, in what order, and then telling people about it clearly.
So I had two options. I could wear the coat for two years and let the sleeves teach me, failing at some of it and succeeding at some of it and calling the whole thing experience. Or I could find people who have worn it longer and ask them how they got their hands out.
I picked the second one, and it turned into a series.
What this is
Once a month I take a creative or marketing leader out for coffee and ask how they actually run their side of the business. My treat, one hour, nothing formal. I bring the questions currently taking up space in my head and they bring however many years they have of answering them.
While going through the transcript I realised this is too golden and useful to keep to ourselves, plus self-leadership includes being honest about where you are still learning, which is easy to say in a workshop and harder to do with your own name on it. We ask it of the teams we work with, so we shouldn’t skip our own turn.
The stranger
I asked a WhatsApp group of founders whether anyone knew someone who had held a role like mine, and was pointed towards Zümral. We had never met, but she was more than happy to give me an hour of her time.
Her route into marketing is not the obvious one. She studied physics, did a master's in it, then looked at what staying in academia in Turkey would mean and decided against it. Marketing looked like a reasonable fit on the job market, so she went there instead, which is the most practical origin story I have heard in a while. Years in large corporations, then the biggest marketplace in Turkey, then a Google Cloud partner, at a point when, as she tells it, Google Cloud itself was not yet operating in the country. That company had built its own product as a separate entity, so she was running marketing and business development for two companies at once. Neither had a marketing team. She built the whole thing from scratch.
I asked for strategy and got folders
My first question was where she would start. I was expecting something about positioning.
What she said was: organise where everything lives. Folders, documents, the written-down version of how work moves from idea to published. If you cannot find what you are looking for, nothing you build on top of it holds. At that company with no documentation, she named the absence of it as the biggest challenge she faced there.
I have been treating documentation as the reward I get once the urgent work calms down. What I'm realising is, the urgent work is not going to calm down.
Where the week goes
I told Zümral my days are a blur. I work morning to evening, everything moves forward slightly, and if someone asks me on a Friday what I did I cannot produce a convincing answer.
Her fix is a sheet. One line per area of work. Social media, ten hours. Website, five. Round the numbers, add buffer, and do not time yourself to the minute, because tracking that becomes its own job defeats the point of tracking.
Two things come out of it. The first is a picture of my week that is not a mood. The second is evidence. I had been telling the founder I needed help with social media and it was landing as a complaint, which is fair, because that is what it was. The hours on socials set against the hours on strategy is a number, and a number is harder to argue with than a feeling.
What to hand over
Once I can see the hours, the question becomes which of them should not be mine. Her method is to picture the thing properly working, the dream scenario, then ask which part of it is currently the problem. Design, content, product marketing, lead generation. Whatever answers that question goes first.
She does this to herself too. She does not do graphic design, having the eye for it but not the hands, so there is a freelancer and a system for working with him. That system is worth more room than I can give it here, so it has a post of its own: The brief you only have to write once.
The thing I had not thought of
Near the end she suggested something that had not crossed my mind. Instead of hiring someone to take the work, hire someone to build the structure. Someone who has set up a marketing function before already owns the templates: content briefs, calendars, the procedure document, the shape of the team. They build it, you run it.
It costs less than a hire and solves a different problem. A hire takes work off your plate. A structure makes every hire after it easier to bring in.
I had been occupied by the idea of hiring someone to do the work, and had not thought about paying someone to build the thing the work runs on.
What I am doing about it
Measuring where the hours go, roughly, with buffer.
Writing things down now, rather than waiting for the quiet week that is not coming.
Asking.
That last one is actually the whole series, and the part of this conversation that surprised me most had nothing to do with marketing. I asked a stranger for help and she said yes. People are generous with what they know. You have to ask for it, which is the only difficult part, and it is not that difficult.
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Monkey See is a monthly series. If you know someone who would be good to talk to, or you fancy being the next coffee, get in touch.
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