As part of a branding exercise, my wife Michelle asked me the following:
What would you say if you were trying to convince someone to work with me or to be my friend?
Michelle (colorized, February 2020)
Let me count the ways.
She will care about you more than you do.
Maybe it’s a commentary on self-love, but Michelle is genuinely the most thoughtful and caring person I have ever met.
At every moment of every day, she is evaluating what she can do, create, buy, or say to make everyone she loves happier.
Are you having a baby? She found this neat, handcrafted product on Etsy, thought of you, and shipped it to you with Grubhub gift card because you’ll need food those first few weeks and she knows it will be tough.
Did you start a new job? Instead of liking your status, she’ll call you and ask how it’s going. Having a tough time with the new coworkers? She’ll vow to slay them and their first borns if they ever hurt your feelings again.
Interested in anything at all? She’ll ask intelligent, engaging questions to allow you room to express your passion even if she doesn’t care about cryptocurrency flash minted tokens at all.
Did you mention off-hand that you enjoyed Bob’s Burgers? In eight months, you’ll be receiving a Bob’s Burgers recipe book for your birthday and handcrafted decorations that include Linda’s fucking face made of construction paper. You’re in her birthday calendar now, motherfucker!
She knows her shit.
It’s one thing to hire someone to complete a task for you.
It’s another to hire someone who will not only consider the larger picture that the task falls into, but also leverage that wider lens to advise on additional routes of attack.
Sure, she can assemble a go to market strategy for your product, but have you considered how this new products fits into your suite? Are you positioning it well for your current market? Have you considered how you could leverage it within your pitch decks? Are your sales teams prepped? Do they even know you’re about to roll it out?? Are you CRAZY?!
Sure, her wealth of experience is useful, but I argue that the mindset is far more valuable. Creative problem solving can extend itself to issues that have never come up. An average marketer can build you a textbook pitch deck based on experience; Michelle can build it for the business your business will become.
That’s the type of player you need on any squad.
She’s creative af.
It’s not enough that she’s smart and thoughtful, but she can take all that and package it up in a beautiful dress presentation.
Whether it be through sheer mastery of Powerpoint (no, like forreal mastery – not bullshit “put it on the resumé” mastery) or whipping up concept art in Indesign, she can take the info, make the words digestible for the audience, and then design the fuck out of it.
Honestly, it’s super annoying because I think I can pick out a decent Powerpoint theme and move things around and she puts me to utter shame like honestly it’s a real problem in our relationship.
Do it.
So, do you want a thoughtful, creative, intelligent, hella fine, masterful marketer to be your friend/contractor?