If I were the first marketer again, this is how I’d plan

A stained carpet, a blank spreadsheet, and power dynamics

I remember the room more clearly than the lesson.

A small office with worn, stained carpet. A ping pong table shoved into the corner like a personality trait. A big screen on the wall with a blank spreadsheet projected onto it, too bright for the size of the room.

It was a planning meeting, though at the time I didn’t have language for what kind. It was me, the only full-time marketing hire, our CEO, our head of sales, a fractional CMO I was learning everything from, and one of our investors who had been through this movie before.

I was nervous in that way you only are when you care deeply and don’t yet know if you deserve to be in the room.

Up until then, I thought being good at marketing meant executing faster and harder than everyone else.

I remember those days well. There was a coffee shop on my way to the office that opened at 6am, and I had to reroute my entire morning because it wasn’t open early enough for how fast I was trying to get to work. Sundays spent alone in the office, trying to outrun the mountain of things I was attempting to do.

In a way, those days were glorious. I was learning so much.

I’m a strong believer in push and pull motivation. If you have that pull - that obsessive energy to work on something, to learn, to immerse - then let it happen. Don’t block it. There are seasons where intensity is exactly right.

But that season has an expiration date. At that point in my career, I didn’t know I was already nearing it.

The planning meeting where effort stopped being the metric

Back in the room, the spreadsheet started to fill. Conferences we were doing. Side events we were proud of. Sponsored webinars. Email campaigns.

I was talking. A lot.

Trying to put things on the board. Trying to claim credit for the work I was doing. Trying, in retrospect, to prove that I was useful.

The fractional CMO was offering ideas. Sales was asking for assets they wanted. The CEO had a handful of exciting, scattered thoughts. It was a familiar chaos. Everyone contributing. Everything feeling important.

And then the investor stopped us.

“No,” he said. “We’re not starting with tactics.”

The room went quiet in that uncomfortable way where you know something true is about to land.

The moment someone took the tactics away

“We need to start with levers,” he said. “What are the needles we need to move? What are the ways this business actually grows? Let’s map those first. Then we decide what we’ll do to drive each one.”

My mind went blank. Then it spiraled.

I remember thinking, I’m the worst marketer in the world. This is so obvious. How did I not see this? What have I been doing?

The fear underneath wasn’t that I’d be replaced. It was that I’d be exposed. This was my first startup. I was wildly unqualified on paper. I wanted to be excellent so badly. And in that moment, it felt like I didn’t even understand the machine I was inside of.

It reminded me of being 17, moving from Africa to the U.S., arriving in Los Angeles with a confidence that dissolved almost immediately. I thought I understood the world. Then suddenly I didn’t even understand what people were talking about half the time. Overconfidence turning into insecurity overnight.

Sitting there, my body reacted before my brain caught up. Tight chest. Heat. That sinking feeling of realizing you’ve been measuring the wrong thing.

When insecurity turned into clarity

And then something else happened. A brain blast of excitement.

Because suddenly I could see the pattern behind the work.

The investor started sketching the levers.

→ Increase efficiency - fixing the leaks in the bucket like conversion rates, win rates, churn.

→ Increase value per customer through higher ACV and expansion.

→ Expand top of funnel in existing segments.

→ Expand top of funnel in new segments.

It wasn’t perfect. It didn’t have to be. What it gave me was a why.

Up until then, I had been celebrating effort. Hours. Output. Velocity. The grind itself.

And that day I had a big, scary realization.

No one cares how hard you worked.

The day I learned that work without leverage is just motion

It doesn’t matter that you drove to the office at 5 a.m. for months straight. It doesn’t matter that you shipped harder than everyone else.

If the work isn’t moving the levers that matter, it’s just work with no leverage.

There are infinite things you could be doing at any given moment. The important part isn’t the list. It’s the choosing.

That meeting permanently broke tactics-first planning for me, because tactics-first planning is how you lose your mind.

Marketing is public. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has an idea. If you’re in reactive mode - trying to execute on all of them, trying to keep everyone happy - you end up working twelve-hour days with nothing to show for it except exhaustion.

If you don’t have a plan, you’ll be given one.

Planning stopped being about pleasing everyone and started being about choosing

Planning with leverage shifted the power dynamic.

Suddenly planning wasn’t about filling weeks or proving usefulness. It was about alignment. About creating the plan together. About agreeing on what success actually looked like. Not being an idea-shipping machine.

If we’d kept planning the old way, we would’ve done hundreds of meaningless things instead of a few meaningful ones, plugging holes instead of building a house.

After that, planning started to feel different in my body. Less frantic. More curious.

Frameworks like this didn’t require me to have all the answers. They gave me better questions to ask.

The first time planning gave me power instead of anxiety

The next time I sat down to plan alone, I didn’t open a giant spreadsheet of everything we could do. Every time you start there, someone will inevitably say “well, we have to do all of it.”

Instead, I started with impact.

I stopped measuring the value of work by how impressive it sounded or who it would make happy. I stopped executing without thinking.

My posture in the room changed.

I realized it wasn’t my job to disappear into the basement and come back with a magical plan. My job was to ask the right questions.

Ironically, that put me in a position of power.

Why levers weren’t enough once the team started growing

As the company grew, something else emerged naturally from that original insight.

Levers answered the why, but we still needed a way to tell a story about the how.

That’s where growth engines came in.

→ Inbound.

→ Outbound.

→ Ecosystem - partners, community, user flywheels.

→ Events.

→ Product virality.

→ Lifecycle and conversion optimization.

Ideas didn’t just map to levers anymore. They lived inside engines.

Not lever one plus 27 tactics, but a clear narrative about which machines we were building and tending.

This mattered even more as the team grew.

Ownership of an engine isn’t just operational clarity. It’s psychological clarity. When someone owns an engine, they know what success looks like. They know where to focus. They stop thrashing.

The sentence I wish I’d heard in that room

That original version of me in the stained-carpet room was trying so hard to prove she belonged by doing everything.

If I could freeze her in that moment and say one sentence, it would be this:

You weren’t hired to answer all your emails.

You were hired to make an impact.

Planning with a soul isn’t about abandoning rigor. It’s about remembering that leverage is the point.

And sanity is the reward.