PERSONAL GROWTH
The Year of Reinvention
Guiding My Own Brand Instead of Someone Else’s
I’ve always been a team guy, motivated by the lure of achievements that can only be had by a group of people working toward a common goal. So it’s no surprise that I spent the first 30 years of my career ensconced in advertising agencies of various shapes and sizes.
I found the agency business the way most 22 year-olds find it, in a recruiting visit by the outreach team at the venerable Leo Burnett out of Chicago. I was immediately struck by how psyched everybody was to help improve the growth of some of the world’s largest brands.
Agencies are team environments, rife with goal scorers, assist leaders, and utility players who can do just about anything the team needs. They’re led by veterans who have been to battle together and come out the other side with stories to tell that stir the imagination of the next generation of agency staff.
Agencies make you believe you can achieve the impossible. In fact the whole model is built on doing just that: winning a piece of business that every other agency on the block wanted just as badly as you did, something that feels so highly unlikely as to seem impossible, until you’ve actually done it a few times.
So a year ago, when I was uninvited from staying at my last agency, I was without a team for the first time in three decades. Fortunately for me, I had nurtured a side hustle that is also a team sport: pickleball. I had leaned so hard into launching a nonprofit, all-volunteer pickleball club in January of 2020 that I essentially had two full-time jobs for the first two years of its existence.
On December 19th, 2022 I turned my side hustle into my hustle hustle, committing myself full time to launching the second-largest indoor pickleball facility in the country.
Moving from 30 years in the agency business to buying a 1970’s-era tennis facility and transforming it into a pickleball Mecca required quite a bit of reinvention. Becoming someone who works for themselves after an entire career of working for somebody else makes you reevaluate everything you thought you knew.
But here’s the twist: agency life prepared me for all of it. Agencies are full of scrappers, people who can MacGyver solutions out of a stick of gum and a couple paper clips. To make it for 30 years in that world, you have no choice but to become one of them.
So my reinvention was really more like a major remodel. I opened a tool box I had stuffed with skills that I might need some rainy day, laid a bunch of them out on the table, and chose the ones that would be most helpful in raising capital, working daily with contractors and subcontractors on a million details large and small, and creating an experiential brand that people would love to be a part of.
The best thing I can say about agency life is that it requires you to be good at a lot of things. Well-trained agency folks can often run circles around those with more “vertical” skillsets, at least when it comes to ideation, iteration, and brand-centric decision making.
Stewarding someone else’s brand is like raising a goldfish: whether it lives or dies, you’re probably going to wake up the next morning feeling fine. But stewarding your own brand is like raising a child: you will literally do anything to help it thrive.
Now that I’m six months into running my own brand rather than someone else’s, I can’t believe I waited so long. As I am with my own kids, I am a careful observer, a passionate supporter, and a tireless promoter of the brand. I want people who experience it to fall in love with it, and I hate it when anything fails to meet their expectations.
I wear joggers and hoodies to work, instead of sport coats and jeans. My new team is made up of people who are as passionate as I am about introducing others to a sport that stands to make them healthier, more connected human beings.
Reinvention is scary, exciting, and stressful, but it’s also fruitful, rewarding, and fun. Kind of like every single day in the agency business.
