Stop juggling the balls, let things break.

• A hard lesson to learn about doing everything, all the time

• Stop being everything for everyone

• How to get your boss to prioritise your work correctly

I polled the whatsapp group to see what today’s issue should be, and the vote was for “unhinged/kinda off topic opinion” — to be honest the first topic that came to mind was “why are so many marketing leaders men when the majority of marketing employees are women” but honestly, I don’t have the energy to get into gender (especially after Sunrise, IYKYK.)

Maybe you’ve heard about the conspiracy theory that marketing is getting renamed to GTM and “growth” to make it more “masculine” and socially acceptable for men to work in it? I do find that interesting, but not something I want to spend time thinking about when I could focus on uplifting rather than tearing down.

And so, we reach today’s topic.

Going back to the roots of Mehdeeka (small teams and solo marketers) I’ve been giving out the same advice a lot recently, so why not write it down once and for all:

The more that you successfully juggle multiple roles (growth, brand, content, events, digital, performance, etc) as a small marketing team, the more you set this level of performance as your baseline and not your maximum capacity.

You’ll be expected to continue doing this, so stop preventing things from breaking and simply let things break.

A hard pill to swallow when you’re an over performer which I’m willing to bet every solo marketer is.

I’ve been there enough times, and interviewed enough solo marketers right here in this newsletter, to know that these marketers are the ones who are getting work done, day in and day out.

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10x-ing your output and impact does not lead to 10x-ing your reward.

(This is the part where I reveal how anti-capitalist I really am, despite working in tech for over a decade lololol)

I think Gen Z have taken the “who cares about work” attitude too far, but the direction is right. Our bosses, business influencers, performance coaches, everyone trying to sell us their shit on LinkedIn, they’re all telling us how to increase our outputs with less team members, and they’re saying “how wonderful." Here’s a literal quote from a LinkedIn post:

one sharp operator with leverage & AI skillset can create the output that used to require a department

Are they… being compensated for this value creation?

Fuck no they’re not.

If anything, they’re threatened by their own job being made redundant because nothing is actually stable anymore. No job is safe from cuts. Lots of companies are cutting staff and claiming “AI” when that’s not even the case, it’s just a fast, simple, and no-explanation-needed cost cutting exercise.

So please, tell me what the incentive is?

When things break, and those things are actually important and not just busy-work your boss thought were nice to haves, the business you work for is incentivised to fix it.

Maybe that’s:

• Finally giving you budget

• Finally giving you an additional resource/intern/freelancer

• Finally giving you additional full time headcount

• Finally giving you a tool

• Finally giving you something as simple as attention from leadership

The point is, if you keep juggling everything at the expense of burning out, that is an expense the company is willing to pay. Everything has a price, and this price is acceptable to corporations.

So stop paying the price!

It feels silly having to add this disclaimer because Mehdeeka is all about uplifting the standard of marketing. If things break because you’re neglecting them and it’s within your capability to do the work, that’s not cool. If things break because:

• You are stretched too thin

• You are not supported in upskilling to be able to do the task

• You don’t have the bandwidth/time/capacity, or

• You’re being held to an impossible standard (often times a mathematically and physically impossible standard at that)

Then let the balls drop. Let things smash and break and burn down.

I love a stocktake. Track every single thing you do for 1-4 weeks. Rank everything between “no one would notice if this never happened again” and “this place would burn down without this.”

Now track how much time you spend or waste on each task, versus how much impact that work actually has.

Lay it all out to your boss, and most importantly, offer your desired alternative, including things like “if we want to continue doing activity X, we need Y resources to do it properly” or “cutting activity Z will give more capacity for A, which has proven to lead to B outcome.”

It’s a short one this week, which is also the finale for this season. If you are struggling with this, you can always, always, always reply to any newsletter via email and it does get to me.

I’m thinking I might take an extended break before season 12, and potentially send out some larger, one off pieces separate to a season, when I have the time and space to explore bigger topics without the pressure of a weekly deadline.

In the meantime, I’ll be in all my regular spots: LinkedIn, Generate’s Slack, and now the DRIP DROP newsletter. If you want more of my writing, my book is here! (and also available on Kobo and Kindle ebook stores)

Love you all, see you soon.

Kayla