I never expected to end up in marketing.
I grew up in a small Vermont town and spent my childhood playing sports, especially baseball. For years, pitching and competing were my main focus, and I thought I’d do that for as long as I could.
Then I needed Tommy John surgery in high school. Recovery took about a year and a half, and just like that, the path I thought I was on disappeared.
I went to college for sport management, planning to work in athletics. But that plan fell apart when a job I thought I had at the University of Vermont was cut from the budget.
Like many people starting out, I ended up in a place I hadn’t planned.
A friend suggested I apply to an SEO job at Dealer.com. That’s where I first learned about digital marketing. I didn’t know much then, but my inquisitiveness and competitive nature pushed me to learn as much as possible.
A few years later, I joined Digital Position as an SEO account lead. After about a year, I started learning PPC so I could handle both areas, which gave me a much better understanding of how marketing works across a business.
Eventually, I moved into operations leadership. My job was to build the systems behind the scenes: onboarding, workflows, task management, and the structures that helped our team and clients work well together.
Never in my life did I imagine becoming a CEO, but after years of building internal systems, I understood how the business really worked. That experience turned out to be the best preparation for the role.
After spending enough time in marketing operations, you start to notice a clear pattern. Most marketing teams don’t fail because their tactics are wrong. They struggle because their structure isn’t right.
The Fragmentation Problem
One of the biggest issues I see in companies is fragmented marketing. SEO is one team, paid media is another, creative is separate, and social and email often operate independently. In some cases, each channel is even handled by a different agency.
Everyone works hard, and everyone is optimizing something. But customers only see one brand. When teams aren’t aligned, the customer experience becomes inconsistent. The SEO team might be answering key customer questions, while the paid team runs ads with completely different messaging, and creative focuses on something else entirely.
Each team is doing its job, but the jobs don’t connect. From inside the company, everything feels busy and productive. From the outside, the brand feels scattered.
Why This Happens
Part of the problem is simply the complexity of marketing today. The number of platforms, data sources, tools, and metrics marketers are expected to manage is overwhelming. Many marketing leaders are highly capable, but managing all of this effectively requires significant time and specialized expertise.
So companies solve the problem in a logical way. They specialize by hiring separate teams or agencies for each channel. That works to a point, but specialization without coordination creates a new issue.
Each team begins to optimize its own piece of the puzzle. Paid media focuses on efficiency, SEO focuses on rankings and traffic, and creative focuses on production and engagement. But no one is responsible for how those pieces fit together. That’s where performance begins to break down.
What Operations Teaches You About Marketing
When I became CEO of Digital Position, one of my priorities was shifting the business away from dependence on a single founder and building something that could scale. That meant building systems for how work moves through the company, how teams collaborate, and how clients experience our work.
Systems are what make good work repeatable. The same principle applies to marketing. When marketing is organized as disconnected tasks, every campaign starts from scratch. When it’s organized as a system, each channel strengthens the others.
Search insights can inform creative strategy. Creative can improve advertising performance. Advertising data can feed back into content. Instead of isolated wins, the entire system improves over time.
The Leadership Lessons That Come With It
Building those systems isn’t always comfortable. One thing I’ve learned as a leader is that failure is often required before lessons really stick. Advice is helpful, but most people don’t fully understand it until they’ve experienced the consequences themselves.
I’ve had to learn that in leadership decisions as well. Early on, I wanted to build a culture that rewarded hard work and supported people, and that’s still important to me. But avoiding difficult decisions can create bigger problems over time.
If someone isn’t performing in a role, leaving the situation unresolved can slowly impact team morale and culture. One person in the wrong role can affect the entire team around them. These decisions are never easy, but they are part of building a healthy organization. And healthy organizations produce better marketing.
Customers Don’t Experience Your Org Chart
The simplest way to understand the problem with fragmented marketing is this: customers don’t experience your org chart. They don’t know which department wrote the article, managed the ad account, or built the landing page.
They experience one brand and one journey from curiosity to purchase. Companies that organize their marketing around that reality tend to grow more consistently. The ones that don’t often feel like they are constantly chasing the next tactic or platform change.
The Real Competitive Advantage
There will always be new platforms, tools, and tactics promising better performance. But the biggest advantage in marketing isn’t mastering a single platform. It’s building an organization where everything works together.
When strategy flows across the entire system and the customer experience feels consistent from the first interaction to the final purchase, growth becomes much more predictable. When it doesn’t, even strong tactics struggle to deliver the results companies expect.
