I Have a Lot of Jobs. Technically, They’re All the Same Job.

One of the questions I am surprisingly bad at answering is, “What do you do?”

There is a technically correct answer. I own a marketing and business consulting company. That's the easy version.

The longer answer gets complicated quickly.

I work on strategy, social media, emails, websites, blogs, brochures, events, training, community projects, consulting, communications, and a rotating collection of projects that make perfect sense in my head and occasionally require a flowchart for everyone else.

For a long time, I thought this meant I needed to narrow things down.

Now I think the common thread may simply be that I like making complicated things make sense.

I like making complicated things make sense.

Give me a business owner with 400 ideas and no idea which one to start with. Give me an event with ten locations, dozens of participants, and information scattered across six spreadsheets. Give me a website that grew organically for eight years and now makes absolutely no sense.

My brain likes that.

I like finding the structure inside the pile. What matters? What needs to happen first? Who needs to know? What are we missing? How do we explain this? How do we turn something everyone keeps talking about into something that actually happens?

Marketing is communication, but so is event planning, community organizing, training, consulting, and leadership.

I also really like connecting things.

People, especially.

One of my favorite things is realizing two people should know each other.

The more different rooms I find myself in, the more obvious those connections become.

A business doesn't exist separately from its community. Marketing doesn't exist separately from operations. An event doesn't exist separately from the businesses surrounding it.

Everything connects to something else.

This occasionally creates a branding problem.

I am fully aware of the irony.

I am a marketing consultant whose own professional life sometimes requires a flowchart.

But not every interest needs to become a service. Not every community role needs to generate business. Not every idea needs to fit neatly underneath the same brand.

Sometimes I am doing something because I care about it. Sometimes I am doing it because I think it should exist. Sometimes I am doing it because someone asked and I made the questionable decision to say yes.

Maybe a career doesn't have to look like a ladder.

My career has looked much more like someone dumped a box of puzzle pieces onto a table.

The path makes considerably more sense looking backward than it ever did looking forward.

Maybe that's normal.

The common thread isn't really a job title. It is what I keep gravitating toward: helping people communicate, making information useful, turning ideas into plans, turning plans into things that actually happen, connecting people, teaching, solving problems, and building systems.

Maybe those aren't ten different jobs.

Maybe they're variations of the same one.

The truthful answer to “What do you do?” is something closer to:

I figure things out. I organize them. I explain them. I connect people to them.

And then, usually, I find another thing to work on.

Apparently that's the job.