How did you get there? What made you decide to start the marketing club in the first place?

Every single role I'm getting, I'm the first marketer.

I'm the only marketer.

I'm a marketer in a very small team.

And the manager doesn't even know what marketing really is.

But I was sort of telling myself in my head, I'm like, oh, I'm early on.

This is probably just, you know, like the things I have to do to get into the industry more.

help.

yeah how long did it take building you know 18,000 we've got to unpack that but because that's a big number like how long did it take to build to build that community

well when I started it literally did a webinar on this last night admitting that I had no idea what I was doing but when I started the marketing club the whole reason that I started it was because I was a marketer coming up my career with no idea what that looked like you know going back to being honest no one in the industry was admitting that they too didn't know what that looked like so I was going to a lot of industry events at the time that I was told were you know the place to like find my people and like network and whatever and it was a pale male stale washout it was you know hearing from CMOs with their 20 million dollar marketing budgets and I was like this is so not what I need right now but the industry wasn't doing anything they were like well you've got that and you've got this over here and like no one's really told us that that's not good enough so we'll just keep on doing the thing and it kind of inspired me like I've very much realized as I've got older that if something doesn't exist I'll build it myself yeah it's a nasty little habit because it gets exhausting I'm like why is it always me but yeah basically I remember driving home one night and I was like okay like this is not what I want what would building what I want look like And I sat on the idea for about a year because when I was in Auckland at the time, Kiwis don't really like to admit what they don't know, right? Like DIYs in our DNA, we don't like asking for help.

Tall poppy syndrome is rife.

So I was like, okay, Chanel, like brilliant idea.

wrong place to do it and then I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me because I always kind of need a pushing point like when I have an idea it's like cancer in my brain and it never goes away but I need a point that is kind of like the agitation of just go and do the thing and that point for me was when I got hired as a head of marketing at a FMCG brand they were growing 200% month on month without marketing so when I got hired you can imagine the pressure that I was under I realized I had to build the marketing function before I actually got to do the marketing.

And it was just an incredibly isolating and lonely journey doing all of that.

And I got to the point where I was like, it would just be nice to have a few people to talk to about what I'm going through.

yeah and then you the the co-working space as well so that's quite a new thing and and similar to what you were you were saying about the marketing club it's just like you saw there wasn't something you're like oh well I'm gonna have to build that now

Yeah.

And the marketing club very much started that way.

So I was a marketer coming up in my career with no idea what a career in marketing looks like.

I realized that I had a nasty little habit or curse, I would more commonly say, of being the first or the only marketing hire in a lot of the businesses that I was going into early on in my career.

And because I didn't know any different, I just thought that was normal.

And after about year five or six, I was like, all right, I'm calling bullshit on this because I'm meeting a lot of other marketers who are in like 20, 30, 50 person team.

So like, where the hell is my team? Like, what am I getting wrong? And I think I started to realize like as my career was progressing, I realized how isolating marketing can be, especially if you are doing it by yourself.

Zealand.

What did you have to change about yourself besides the showing up part? Like what did you have to change about yourself or leave behind to be this person? I

think...

Probably doubt, like a lot of, I think like to understand it a little bit more, like I grew up with parents who always owned their own businesses.

So whether I liked it or not, my childhood was privy to the wins of owning your own business and then the losses of owning your own business and then also the sacrifices that you make.

So I think when I was kind of coming up and realizing, you know, who I wanted to be versus how I was, I was looking at the things that I had to leave behind and seeing my parents both own their own businesses.

You don't do that unless you believe that the thing you're going to do is going to work.

And I doubted myself a lot, whether it was, you know, by my own doing, by societal pressures, by being with the wrong partners or by trying to fit in because everyone else around me was kind of like pushing me into this, you know, hole.

What part of your identity still feels like a work in progress?