The Six-Week Job I Failed At

In January 2018, I was scraping together a living as a marketing consultant when I answered a Craigslist ad for a part-time marketing manager position.

That was how I met Benny Traub.

Benny understood marketing at a level I had not encountered before — not in the broad strokes, but in the details. Analytics, reports, spreadsheets, the operational infrastructure that supports a functioning marketing department. Those were not my natural strengths.

After six stressful weeks, Benny and I came to the honest conclusion together that I was not the right person for the position. It felt, at the time, like a fairly clear failure.

The Interview That Should Not Have Gone Well

A few weeks later, I applied for a marketing role at a company I was genuinely interested in — a position that listed an MBA as a requirement I did not have.

During the interview, something unexpected happened. Roughly 80 percent of the questions were about things I had learned during those six weeks with Benny. Analytics, reporting, the kind of operational thinking I had been forced to develop quickly.

Without that experience, I would have been completely out of my depth. I was offered the job before I got home.

The Part I Could Not Have Planned

When I arrived, I discovered my new employer had a serious marketing problem. So I called Benny. This time, I hired him.

Over the following year, we rebuilt the company’s marketing together. Revenue grew from roughly ten million dollars the year before I arrived to fifteen million dollars during my time there.

When I left in 2019, Benny hired me. Two years later, he asked me to become president of Student Marketing Agency.

The man who had once concluded I was not suited to a junior management position was asking me to run his company.

I have spent some time thinking about the irony of that, and about everything that had to happen in between. Every relationship, every lesson, every opportunity that followed — all of it traces back to six stressful weeks in a job I thought I had failed at.

Sometimes the most important chapter of a career is the one that looked, at the time, like a setback.