Set Sail
Five short blasts of a ship's horn indicate danger, in this case a siren's song too tempting to ignore.
Generation Ex explores every ‘ex’ in our lives - our expertise, our expectations and our experiences - and how they can be a catalyst for personal growth when your professional (or personal) journey suddenly shifts under your feet.
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A few of you have heard this story first-hand over the past month but I wanted to share here as it’s a valuable reminder of the reason I am working so hard to maintain control of my professional trajectory and the dangers of being tempted into giving it up.
Last month I wrote about the battle between keeping the faith in my choices and the doubt that can come from being locked up with your own uncomfortable silence that sprouts during the natural ebb and flow of annual business cycles.
I mention in ‘A Cost to Quiet’ a moment of weakness (ok, more than a few moments of weakness) where I applied for and then landed an interview. What I hadn’t mentioned was that it was an interview with a company that charters and sells Superyachts.
Yes, you read that right. Super. Yachts.
The kind of boats you see in Bond movies, crewed by dozens of soon-to-be-falling-overboard men all wearing jump suits and helmets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, helmed by a bald, wheel-chaired fat man with a cat in his lap…
…at least that’s what the job description said…
Now, I am never one to pass up a challenge, particularly one that has offices in Sydney, Europe and the US but I can’t say that I wasn’t skeptical.
Look, I love MDMA-fueled raves aboard 50m yachts floating off the coast of Cannes just as much as the next guy but giving up my commitment to purpose-guided, professional freedom that I’ve spent a year now working toward required a more serious laying out of the pros and cons of going back to work for someone else and their clients.
Here’s what that my calculations looked like:
Cons - Russians. Saudis. Cartel. Tech Bros.
Pros - Um… Coke?
Ok, a push. Let’s do this.
After a brief, enjoyable phone interview where I got a chance to recount among other qualifications my year spent acquiring deckhand certification and working on a boat in the harbor (those stories are coming, don’t worry), I was surprised to be invited to come in for a face-to-face interview in their shiny Sydney offices.
‘Yay,’ I thought.
‘We will send you the task we’d like you to complete and present when you come…’
‘Boo,’ I thought.
I am no stranger to a candidate having their mettle tested to see if a bit of pressure can transform someone chatting pleasantly on the phone into a sweating, stammering, IRL version of Gil Gunderson, the put-upon, failed salesman from the Simpons series.
Two things I pride myself on, however, are being able to put together a well-articulated and slickly designed slide deck and then presenting it to strangers. As such, I looked forward to sinking my teeth into it for the meeting a short three days hence.
What did the task call for, you ask?
Let’s take a paraphrased look.
Task 1 (um, I guess there will be more than one task)
Discover an insight about high-converting Superyacht purchasers (do they buy more than one?) and be prepared to provide an explanation and example of how you found it.
Ok, looks good, data-driven approach to inform strategy and development. I’d have the exact same starting point if I were doing this on my own. Sweet.
Task 2
Take this finding and develop it into a content series.
Ideas. Treatments. Pitching. Right up my alley…
Please include multiple pieces of content that fit the following channels:
- Podcast (include brief and scripts)
Hmmmm, OK…
- YouTube video (with storyboards)
Uhhhh…
- Instagram Reel (with design template recommended)
WTF?
eDM
Oh, haha. You’re kidding. Good one.
Press Release
Oh, you’re not kidding.
LinkedIn Post
Wait, I’m confused.
Website Article
Did you hire me and I forgot?
There are so many ‘swearing eddies’ I can get trapped and drown in having now typed this out for the first time, not the least of which being,
Close your eyes and describe to me in what world Goldfinger decides to buy a Superyacht and spends his evenings flicking through your Instagram feed?’
Not to mention, all the things in that task list above I get paid a decent wage to produce.
I’m very reticent, as I’m sure you would be, about walking into a room with a stack of even semi-fleshed out work, handing it over to someone you’ve never met with no assurance that afterward you won’t be led into the next ‘office’ where you suddenly find yourself standing in the parking lot out back listening to the sounds of muffled laughter through the door that just slammed behind you.
Wait! No! Don’t fuck this up. Remember… wanton hedonism.
Oh, yeah. Right.
So how to proceed?
Maybe, somewhere in the ‘Goldfinger Pardox’ above is the crux of a deeper question that needs answering before any strategy can be devised…
How do you reach someone who, for all intents and purposes, is unreachable through the regular channels?
That, I could sink my teeth into. I began to dig.
Starting with my dormant, pre-pandemic, band of expat, Thanksgiving merry-makers, I reached out to a friend who is in the business and was connected to a lovely man down at Superyacht marina (yes, there is one) who hosted me for coffee and an illuminating conversation about the business of boats and the people who put down millions of dollars to buy them.
It seems that the 1:1 relationships between the sales persons and the buyers or their agents was the most important factor in moving a buyer down the path to purchase.
Not exactly string theory-type insight but I had my data point on which to build a case.
My plan was to establish the core problem for the company - which at its essence was a misaligned brand voice between charters and sales - present the data point and how I discovered it then present a top-down content approach to feeding the appropriate channels in a way that made sense, all in support of those 1:1 relationships.
I had no intention of building out the next 18 months of content for them for free but would be happy to say, ‘if it were me, this is what I would do.’
Seemed reasonable.
On the day, I got dudded up in my finest finery and marched off to one of the poshest neighborhoods in Sydney - which is saying something - and walked into the office.
To say I had some expectation of how I would feel - as premonition in a nightmare, maybe - would be wrong by half. Let me be succinct.
Old. Fat. Poor.
That is the sweet, sweet rain that washed over me as I stepped through the door.
Now, I am not too much of any of those things but as they say, comparison is the fastest way to self-loathing and I was suddenly on the bullet train to a bender.
There was spit-shine on the spit-shine and that was just the guy sitting at one of the desks in the front of the office, designing an Instagram post… hey, wait a minute…
But. BUT, I have faith in ideas and I still had my pitch perfected and my personality primed.
I was ready and it was sublime. The dance between design, ideas and my own articulation of the two flowed beautifully. I was in my happy place…
… right up until about 3/4 of the way through when the CEO, seated between the screen and myself, spun her chair away from me, dropped her head and got on her phone…
Snapchatting friends? Plans for lunch? Reading GenerationEx? Whatever it was it was amazing to behold.
Was I stunned. Maybe.
Was I angry? No.
Was I disappointed? Sure.
In her defense, I will remind you that I did almost none of the things I was asked.
But in mine, I wasn’t there to show anyone I can do the same things 1000 other people (including, your computer at this point) can do. I can throw a cat out my back door and hit someone who can design an Instagram post… or in this instance, out toward the front of their office at old ‘spit-shine’…
My job was to show that I think differently than anyone else who will walk through the door. You may not like that ‘different’ but I know there are plenty of people who do.
This freedom to search for those who value the difference is why I am trying to hold on to my own direction and why I keep banging my head on doors to find and work with them.
That’s hard to remember sometimes.
But it’s better than the gilded cage of a 50m Superyacht, cruising into Monaco for a week of Grand Prix racing, replete with babes, booze and blow…
…fuck, what have I done?
I always look forward to these and this one made snort with laughter more than once.
Maybe she received a notification from Net-a-Porter that her Wishlist item was on sale? It would be wrong for you to judge her poorly in that case.