Liberation for Marketers.

Liberation for marketers. That's what I preach.

When I was a madman, in my callow youth, I used to tell people the thing I loved most about my job was the variety.  And whilst I was a practitioner that was indeed true.  The trouble is as I became more successful and started my own creative agency (1576 Advertising Limited) the practitionership dried up and the management took over.

No longer was this a career full of variety and constantly changing challenges.  Instead, it became Groundhog Day, and I began to loathe it.

So, I did what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do. 

I resigned.

I went back out into the woods, hunter-gathering for business, of what form I knew not what.

It was magic. 

It was liberation.

16 years later I’m still at it and I’ve undertaken everything from one-day ‘gigs’, to a five-year role at a PLC, three days a week, with a task that changed constantly and was very good for mortgage paying.

I’ve had nearly 100 clients over that space of time and so my appetite for change has been fully satiated.

It’s what they now call a portfolio career.  I’ve called it consulting (yuk) and freelancing (hmmm) but whatever you call it, it has been feeding my appetite for minestrone rather than cream of chicken.

I imagine a career in marketing, in a senior role, such as you probably have, is either one of two things; deeply satisfying and fully engaging or stultifying.

If it’s the latter I would most certainly extol the virtues of a portfolio career.  Get out and feel the wind in your hair (that, for male readers, may however be more of a memory than a reality).

Work your own hours.

Sit at your own desk, perhaps with a lovely view of your lakeside estate. (In my case the cul-de-sac across the road.)

Enjoy your own coffee. When the mood takes you.  And on a Friday swap that for wine and sit in the back garden (admittedly the opportunity to do this in Scotland is strictly limited.)

Take long lunches whenever it takes your fancy. (Typically thwarted because all your old muckers are in meetings.)

Maybe I can help you facilitate the above because I’ve made a late pivot in my career.  I’m still portfolio working but it’s taking me back, in a way, to my agency days as I set out to build a team of portfolio-career-seeking marketers. 

All very senior. 

All looking for the variety that I have enjoyed for so long.

All with unique and valuable experience that can be applied in new ways.

It’s a new concept in Scotland, but it’s well established in London and the English and Welsh regions (and South Africa too actually).

Called The Marketing Centre, we will offer mainly SME’s (and that in itself will be liberating for the right people) highly qualified part-time Marketing Director positions, typically a day a week.  And three or four of them dependent on their appetite.

Not gigs, not interims, not change management.  Proper roles, long term, making a difference.

It’s a liberating and exciting thought for some.

And that’s why I’m preaching (just like Hugh Cornwell did in 1977).

Mark Gorman is Regional Director for The Marketing Centre in Scotland.