Early 2024, I thought I had landed one of the biggest opportunities of my career.
I interviewed against many major media/digital companies competing for the opportunity to take on an enterprise marketing role in Savannah for an owner with four large, well-known businesses and millions of dollars flowing through their marketing efforts.
Four completely different entities.
- A radio station has its own marketing ecosystem, audience, revenue model, and set of challenges.
- A car dealership is an entirely different animal. The buying cycle, customer acquisition strategy, brand positioning, local competition, inventory, and advertising requirements all demand a different approach.
- A golf course has another set of considerations entirely. Hospitality, lifestyle, membership, events, experiences, and local brand positioning all become part of the marketing equation.
Each business required its own strategy, while all four operated under one large enterprise.
After a month of interviewing, my company got the role!
At the time, I believed that was the victory.
I had earned my seat at the table.
This was a large cash cow client that would not only drive tons of money to XOB Marketing, but we would learn so much in the process!
My plan for the first 30 days was intentionally strategic. I was not going to walk in and immediately start changing things simply to prove I had arrived. I wanted to sit and observe.
I wanted to understand how each business actually operated before I touched its marketing.
I wanted to learn the teams at every location, understand who was responsible for what, see where the processes worked and where they broke down, understand how decisions moved through the organization, and identify the dynamics that existed inside each business.
Most importantly, I wanted to understand the owner behind his desk. The desk he sat at all day, every day. Monday–Friday, 8 a.m.–5 p.m., without leaving his cube.
He was DIFFERENT.
I wanted to know…
How did he communicate with each team?
How did he make decisions?
What did he respond to?
What did he value?
How did the different businesses operate under his leadership?
Before you can effectively market a business, you have to understand the business. Before you can change a system, you have to understand the system.
That was my intention.
Then I started seeing what existed underneath it.
What I encountered over the following months was difficult to describe without sounding like I was describing a movie.
The manipulation was deliberate. The control was pervasive. The humiliation was gross. The psychological warfare was so calculated that, at times, I found myself thinking that a person who could write this story would have to be extraordinarily disturbed to make this shit up.
I am not talking about the kind of producer who makes a dramatic film.
I mean a producer who understands psychological thrillers. The kind of person who could sit in a room with a team of writers and spend hours constructing the mechanics of manipulation, coercion, intimidation, humiliation, control, and power.
The kind of story that would require the audience to suspend disbelief because the reality would seem too twisted to be believable.
Except I was watching it happen.
I watched employees absorb treatment that no workplace should normalize.
I watched people return to work knowing exactly what they were walking back into, all carrying sad, low-frequency energy.
Time passed, and I watched the businesses continue to grow.
I was perplexed.
The machine worked.
The revenue continued.
The customers continued to come.
The employees continued to show up.
The businesses continued to succeed.
For months, I could not reconcile those facts. I could not understand how someone could build multimillion-dollar businesses while operating from such a deeply limited understanding of and care for other human beings.
Then I asked myself a different question.
If this person can build a multimillion-dollar enterprise with that mindset, why have I been limiting myself with mine?
That was the moment everything changed.
He had significant limitations in the way he understood relationships, people, and the world around him. Somehow, he had taken his experiences and converted them into something extraordinarily powerful.
He built.
He figured out how to make money.
He figured out how to keep the machine moving.
The lesson was not that I needed to become more ruthless.
The lesson was much more profound.
If he could do it, I could do it too.
The part I took with me was not the narcissism.
It was not the manipulation.
It was not the cruelty, the anger, or the damage he carried into every room.
I had no interest in becoming any of those things.
What I took was something much more fundamental.
He was not limited by his past. He was motivated by it!
That distinction changed me.
He did not come from some perfect set of circumstances. He did not have every advantage. He had been bullied. He carried anger. He had experiences that clearly shaped him in ways that, still to this day, he had never fully resolved.
Yet he did not sit there and decide that his past meant he could not build something extraordinary.
He used it as fuel.
That was the part I took and ran with.
Because not everyone walks into life with the same starting line.
Not everyone comes from money.
Not everyone has a master’s degree.
Not everyone has parents who can open doors for them.
Not everyone has connections, capital, confidence, or a perfect résumé.
Some people are starting with nothing but an idea and the willingness to believe it could become something.
I realized I had been treating some of my own circumstances as limitations when they could have been resources.
That is the power of alchemy.
You do not get to choose everything that happens to you.
You do get to decide what you make from it.
He showed me that a person can take the very things that could have become excuses and turn them into motivation.
I simply decided to do it differently.
I did not need his anger.
I did not need his cruelty.
I did not need his narcissism.
I had something else.
I had my heart.
I had my beautiful perspective.
I had my ability to connect with people, see possibility, create relationships, build trust, think strategically, and care deeply about the things I was building.
If he could take his circumstances and build a gold mine, then I could take mine and build something extraordinary too.
That was when I began to understand the power of alchemy in a completely different way how it also shows up in business.
Alchemy is not about changing what happened to you.
It is about changing what you create from it.
He used his wounds to create power.
I decided to use mine to create purpose.
He used anger.
I chose light.
He used control.
I chose connection.
He used fear.
I chose vision.
The alchemy was the same.
The material was different.
That experience changed the trajectory of my professional life.
It taught me about business, leadership, psychology, power, manipulation, human behavior, and the mechanics of influence.
It also taught me something far more personal.
Sometimes the person who shows you the ugliest version of power is the person who finally makes you understand your own.
I would not take the experience back.
It was not a good experience.
It was an important one.
Because it forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding for years.
What could I build if I finally stopped limiting myself?
My answer was simple.
More.
Much more.
We live in a country where someone can come from very little and build something extraordinary. Circumstances matter. Resources matter. Opportunity matters. Mindset matters, too.
You do not have to come from money.
You do not have to have the perfect story.
You do not have to wait for someone to give you permission.
You have to decide that you are willing to build, and then you just show up each day and build.
You lock in and FN grind!
The mind will convince you that you need more before you are allowed to begin.
More money.
More credentials.
More connections.
More experience.
More validation.
More permission.
Sometimes the only thing missing is the decision to stop treating your past as a limitation.
He was not limited by his past. He was motivated by it.
That sentence stayed with me.
I took it.
I ran with it.
I just chose to alchemize it into something different.
That was The PIVOT.
I walked into that experience believing I had been given an opportunity to prove what I could do for someone else’s empire.
I walked out realizing I no longer have anything to prove, only everything to gain!
XO,
