They Don’t Teach You Hunger in Business School
By Tayler Bunge, Co-Founder at Loop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about hiring.
In the eComm growth industry, you’re typically lauded and fly fast up the ranks if you have a combination of the following:
- fast
- intuitive
- ability to sell
- strong creative instincts
- adherence to direction
What’s less on industry directors’ radars are whether you can play an instrument, read de Beauvoir, or broke a restaurant’s sales record during a weekend rush.
And why would they be?
In performance based marketing, performance is key — and you can typically predict optimal performance with students of the industry.
But my cofounders and I come from weird places.
Tim Keen, an Aussie immigrant, toured with a band for years, studied violin performance and pharmacology, and created websites for clients funded by his own bank account — all while trying to build credit in the US.
Tim Gachot, a France-born Cali-raised former engineer (and an aerospace grad school drop-out), once shucked oysters in a French fish factory and has spent years oscillating from motion graphics, to startup mentoring, to photography, to improv.
Me, a Chinese adoptee and Philosophy major who worked full time at bars throughout college slinging tequila. I spent a quick stint at film school before deciding on a career as a slam poet before deciding on a career as a teacher before… In a heavy year I was an SEO writer, taco server, marketing intern, and Uber driver.
None of us are “classically trained” in digital marketing.
But we all seem hellbent on one thing: a commitment to trying everything. A hunger for learning differently than we had the time before.
Now in a position where I’m frequently vetting professionals for our team, I keep coming back to what seems to be a long-standing myth about marketing success: background = expertise = performance.
A clear equation in most industries.
Not so clear in growth marketing.
Our biggest successes have come from us realizing traditional models might not work, that you have to get ahead of the problem with a solution before a problem even exists. That you have to always be moving, challenging, breaking rules, and trying. You won’t find 100% YoY growth in a marketing guide.
Our track records help train, of course.
But hunger can’t be taught in business school. Our clients don’t meet growth goals because we learned how a couple agency’s processes work.
A stubborn dedication to a constant iterative imagination reigns supreme in my hiring process — and among everything we try, our clients know we always try something new.
