A quick note before the first one. This is AIdvantaged, a newsletter about my adventures helping businesses take control of their go-to-market and revenue growth, and more often than not how my use of AI is giving me and my clients an advantage. I have been writing on LinkedIn every Wednesday since April and kept running into things that needed more than a post. This is where those go. Reply anytime. I read all of them.
An appropriate place to start:
Career pivots and the value of “yes, and.”
I have enough grey in my beard to have seen my fair share. For myself, for friends, for family. Some are voluntary, like the early days when you’re trying new things, or deciding to get an MBA with a two- and four-year-old at home. Highly recommend you think twice on the latter. MBA great. Two little ones add a 5x difficulty factor.
Some are involuntary, like so many people in my network recently. And some land in the middle. You read the tea leaves and jump before anyone asks you to.
What I’ve found is that no matter how you get there, the golden rule of improv works. Take what comes at you as a yes, then “and” your next move on top. That’s how I’ve found every next thing I’ve done. Sometimes it puts you in places you never thought possible or never even considered.
April was a yes. After three-plus years as CMO at Case Status, a job and a group of people I love, I moved on. It was one of my favorite stops in a wonderful and unconventional career, at least most of the time. We built the marketing team and the GTM process from scratch, scaled from $2M to over $10M in ARR, and made the Inc. 5000 three times. Then the company entered a new chapter, and it was time.
Roman Growth Advisors was the and. Fractional CMO work for B2B SaaS companies where growth is happening but still feels fragile. Six months in, I have run three client engagements, learned that prospecting for yourself is harder than any pipeline you ever built for someone else, and handed more of the work to AI than I would have admitted to or been comfortable with in April. The learnings and the speed have been life-changing, but that’s for future installments.
Sometimes things move quicker than we expect, and on October 1 there is another “and.” I am partnering into something bigger than a one-man practice, and I will tell you what in a couple of weeks when they let me. The fractional work continues, with a bench behind me.
Call it faith in the universe, God, or luck. The yes is usually decided for you, but the “and” is all yours.