The Generalist Tax
I'm good at a lot of things and it feels like the internet is trying to make me feel bad about it
The piece of advice I heard the most in college as an Advertising and Public Relations major was that if you want to move up and make a meaningful salary jump, you will have to move jobs every two(ish) years. Now, they didn’t know I would graduate in May of 2020 and all bets would be off, but that’s a lane that I don’t really care to revisit.
The second piece of advice (which to be fair was completely inferred) was that you need to pick a lane. Agency or in-house? Copy, design, or brand management? But, the funny thing about this was that my college only offered one course per speciality. I took one copywriting course, one brand management course, a few design courses (they really said make sure you KNOW Illustrator) and a few more random ones. So, at 18 not only was I presented with the pressure to pick a career, but I also was presented with just one chance at exploration for a niche within an industry that was built on mastering your niche.
I took all of this a little too literally. I stayed at my first job for 23 months, my second for 26 and then my third career job nine months (laid off due to business mismanagement, or maybe it was his home pickleball court construction? We’ll never know) and I’m just approaching 11 months at my current career position. Each one was a different niche.
Content Coordinator (Direct Mail and Donation Quality Assurance) at a non-profit marketing agency
Marketing Coordinator (for the brand of same non-profit agency)
Project Manager (for six clients) at an advertising agency mainly focused on outdoor recreation
Marketing Engagement Manager (I swear this was a fake made up position title because they had SO many rounds of layoffs) in-house
and currently, Paid Media Specialist for an in-house restaurant group supporting 14 brands and 40+ locations.
and also, owner of my own boutique social media agency, Spill Social, offering just about everything I’ve done and then some to my clients
All of that to say, I build the strategy, I build the creative, I write the copy, I architect the campaign, I know how to analyze what’s off and translate that into ‘client-speak’. The word for this is generalist. And for some reason, the stigma with that is that generalist translates to “still figuring it all out.”
And I know it is COMPLETELY ironic to say that the specialist owns the room and I own the hallway because I literally have specialist in my current job title, but you get what I mean.
Campaigns go to die in handoffs where those don’t understand the whole picture and don’t ask questions to paint it. Think the copywriter who has never run a media buy who writes lines for placements they can’t contextualize. The performance marketer who can’t on-the-fly create a new headline variation because that’s “not their job.”
When everyone stands in their own room, someone needs to own the hallway and open the doors. That’s where I feel I land. Maybe that’s the project manager in me coming out, but being a chameleon to your surroundings to develop into a multifaceted talent is invaluable, and I’ve received that feedback many times.
Let me give you a real one. I spent some time building a campaign not only in the financial services sector, but the businesses name had a women’s fertility buzzword in the company title. Talk about constraints. The audience was finally tight enough to where I wasn’t second-guessing it. Creative felt good and crispy (IYKYK) and I was proud as HELL. Launch and a dud.
It took me awhile to find what was wrong, and when I did, it was stupid. The hook in the copy specified one thing and then the creative oversimplified a promise. Not contradictory, just misaligned enough that a person coming across and spending more than three seconds probably noticed it. Client saw the copy. I had a friend take a peek, nothing. I ran it by my fellow social media managers when we bounce ideas, and it was all clean. The rip was invisible to everyone because it lived between their jobs, which is to say it kind of lived in no one’s ask.
That’s the thing about handoff failures. It’s no one’s fault. It just shows up as a number that everyone involved has an alibi for.
Picking up new skills has never been some ego-boosting, noble growth mindset thing. Half of it was out of annoyance of waiting for someone to reply to me in Slack. Some of it was hitting walls where I couldn’t fix something because I didn’t understand the next step in the user journey process, so I’d learn that thing. Other times, sometimes your people have life happen to them, and you just have to step in and do what you can to not only take something off of their plate, but to help hit the deadline.
Range isn’t shallow. Being knowledgeable enough to hold the entire funnel in your head and know which part needs adjusting at any day of the week is a real skill. There isn’t a clean title for this (maybe it’s Marketing Engagement Manager, lol), so it naturally gets undervalued right up until a campaign is on fire and suddenly everyone needs you without spinning up a war room and contracting four freelancers on a tight deadline who doesn’t know the brand.
The caveat of this is that yes, it does cost me money. The Generalist Tax. I’ve seen specialist quote rates I can’t say out loud to clients. Sometimes, this is what’s necessary. I’ve seen the backend of WebFlow and I just can’t pretend like I can do it. I can’t. Bring in help, please.
But, the specialist gets the higher day rate and often times the shorter engagement. They come in, they fix the singular thing, they leave and the brand keeps churning through the next specialist and the next. And the next. When you can touch the entire thing, you don’t get cut when things tighten, because cutting you means losing a whole lot more value. The specialist optimizes for the rate. I optimize for still having the client in eighteen months. Two games. I pick the latter. On purpose.
The reason I love what I do is because no day looks the same. It keeps me on my toes. I’m challenged. The work is genuinely fun. I like the entire process. I like the copy, the buy, the creative and the ROI at the end that tells you if any of it worked. Even if I fail, I like what I learn. It makes me better.
Owning one slice of the industry and never touching the rest is not focus that I jive with. I’d get antsy and restless and resentful. I don’t want to hate an industry that I love.
So, I won’t niche down. I’ll keep going wider, picking up that new platform, on purpose, with purpose and eyes wide open, windows down, at 70 mph. Those that can adapt and step up are the ones who stop being replaceable when things get hard.
But, at the end of the day, this is just pixels on a screen and I am (sometimes) able to just say, “It’s not that deep” and move on.
xoxo,
The Jack of All Trades, Master of The Funnel