Baby's First Deal

Shortly after the first of the year the CEO called me into his office and told me he'd hired Jordan.
Jordan is a beautiful young woman of African, Chinese, American heritage, who graduated magna cum laud in three years from an Ivy League college in something like history. She'd moved to California for some unknown reason, and while there decided that she was going to make a name for herself in marketing. She set about haunting successful marketing and advertising executives she read about. She'd hounded the CEO for months and finally he agreed to meet her. She flew to Chicago, met with the CEO, worked the word 'penurious' into her conversation with me and a week later was hired.

The day the CEO told me he'd hired Jordan, he'd been in several tough meetings and was in a particularly foul mood. He informed me that it was my personal responsibility to turn Jordan into a marketing superstar.

"I'll do my best," I said.

"That's not good enough."

"OK. Consider her your next superstar."

I know nothing...nothing...about marketing and within a week I was meeting for an hour every day trying to tell this very smart young woman, who also knew nothing about marketing, how to become a marketing professional. She told me that she wanted to be unconventional and not only, "think outside the box, but redefine the box." Hell, at least she knew what the box was.

I started talking about tarot cards and archetypes. We talked about Karl Jung, and from there talked about developing our clients into archetypal modes. Jordan was really excited about the idea and researched tarot cards and Joseph Campbell and Karl Jung for weeks. Finally, she went into a big marketing meeting and started talking about archetypes and their role in branding our clients. They practically threw her from the office, and our daily meetings were reduced to once a week.

About a month ago Jordan came to my office on a day that had been less than pleasant for me. I asked her what she was working on, and she told me she was making cold calls, trying to drum up personal appearances for our clients. I asked about any creative projects and she started to cry. She said nobody liked her ideas and she was beginning to think she'd made a big mistake.

I lost my cookies. I chewed her out for an hour and told her that if she wanted to be superstar in marketing she needed a tougher skin. I told her she was going to have a million brilliant ideas that nobody but she would like. I ordered her out of my office and literally told her not to come back until she had something creative to show me.

Yesterday was the day. She sat down all bubbly and told me how she refocused her research on one client and found out everything about him, and then drew parallels between him and his sponsors. Then she identified a unifying them and found a gap. She then researched products to fill the gap, and found the perfect one. She made some calls and began negotiating her first deal.

It's a very small deal, but the significant thing about it is that it's not random. It's the lynch pin to the entire marketing strategy. She found the missing link. This was something that a collective thirty years of experience had failed to do, and she did it on her own in four months.

Jordan and I talked and celebrated in my office for about an hour. I couldn't have been more proud if I'd done it all myself. That one hour made up for the last six weeks of horror. I'd forgotten what a good day at work felt like.