I Didn't Plan to Be a Marketer. But Apparently, I Always Was.
If you had asked me at 12 what I'd be doing at this stage of my life, I would have described something involving fabric swatches, floor plans, and a very organized client binder.
What I wouldn't have described was running a digital marketing business. And yet, here I am. And looking back, it makes complete sense.
It started with a design degree
I graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in Interior Design. I loved it. I'm still proud of it. And I genuinely use those creative skills every single day, just not in the way I originally imagined.
My first real job was at an experiential event agency in Atlanta. I was hired as a design assistant, and my job was very much floor plans and logistics. But my best friend worked in the art department. And whenever I wasn't deep in a floor plan, I was hanging around with her team, poking my nose into their projects, helping with little things here and there.
I didn't think much of it at the time.
Then I moved to Alaska — as you do when you're young, in love, and trying to nudge a long-term boyfriend toward a proposal. (Reader: it worked.) I landed a job as a transaction coordinator and office manager for the number one real estate team in Anchorage. The more accurate title would have been something like chief do-it-all — from organizing transactions and chasing paperwork to writing listings and handling basic marketing. But then they found out I could do graphic design. Suddenly, I was redesigning their flyers, managing their social media, and pushing the role further than it was ever originally scoped. Nobody stopped me. And honestly, nobody had to ask.
Then we ended up in New York. I temped as an executive assistant at a real estate investment firm, then settled into a full-time role as office manager for an organizational change consultancy. My actual job was coordinating calendars and wrangling schedules for a team of consultants and executives. But somewhere along the way, they found out I could do graphics. And just like that, I was also creating newsletters, designing presentation layouts, and updating the website.
Eventually, I had my first son, traded city life for the suburbs, and decided it was finally time to actually work in interior design. The field I'd gone to school for but somehow never quite landed in. I found a job listing for a project manager role at an award-winning residential studio nearby and went for it. I was there for five years as the founder's right-hand woman. And yes — still — I found my way to updating their website, the print materials, the social content.
Are you seeing it? Because I wasn't. Not yet.
Every single role I'd ever had, I somehow ended up in the same corner, the creative one, the marketing one. I had graphic design skills from college that quietly made themselves useful everywhere I went. I wasn't always hired to do it. I just kept doing it anyway, because I could, and because I enjoyed it.
Then I was a photo organizer
After my second son was born, I stepped away from full-time work and started thinking seriously about building something of my own.
My mom has always loved photographs. Growing up, our house was covered in them — framed on the walls, tucked into albums, everywhere you looked. And a few years earlier, I'd suffered through a break-in. My computer and camera were stolen. I lost an entire year of photos and it gutted me.
After that, I took a course to learn how to properly back up and organize my photos. And when I started looking for a business idea, I came across a mentorship from that same instructor on how to build a photo organizing business.
It felt like a sign. I'm organized. I love photos. I know how to do this. I genuinely thought I'd enjoy it.
And I did enjoy parts of it. But it never really took off. And more honestly? It felt harder than it should have. Not the organizing itself, but the selling of it. The convincing people that they needed it. The explaining what it even was.
Meanwhile, I’d stay up all night to work on my website or design things in Canva. Getting way too excited about an Instagram post or an email sequence.
Procrastinating the actual business tasks to do the marketing ones.
The slow realization
It wasn't a single lightbulb moment. It was more like the lights slowly coming up in a room you've been sitting in for a while.
I started asking myself some uncomfortable questions.
What had actually lit me up in past jobs? What did I find myself doing when no one was asking me to? What would I stay up late for?
The answers were all the same thing. Every time. Every job. Every version of my career.
It was always the marketing. The design. The strategy. The systems that make it all run.
I'm a natural problem-solver, but I work best when I'm responding to someone else's challenges and not just staring at my own. I need to collaborate. I need to create with people. Photo organizing is solitary work. It turns out, I'm not.
The pivot
So I stopped pushing the business that wasn't working and started building the one that was already trying to emerge.
I rewrote my messaging. Rebuilt my website from scratch. Sat through courses. Asked hard questions. Did all the uncomfortable things that pivoting requires.
And slowly, it clicked. I now have five clients I genuinely love working with. One content client just renewed for another year. The work doesn't feel like I'm forcing it anymore, because I'm not.
It turns out the degree, the event agency, the real estate office in Anchorage, the consultancy, the design studio — they were all just different chapters of the same story. I just couldn't read the title until now.
If you're in the messy middle
Maybe you started something that made sense at the time, but doesn't quite fit anymore. Maybe you keep "procrastinating" on the real work to do the thing that actually lights you up.
Pay attention to that.
The thing you keep gravitating toward when no one's asking you to? That's not a distraction. That's data.
Your mess might just be the map.
If you're a female founder who's done doing her own marketing alone, I'd love to be your person. Let's work together →
