Brandon Lipman

When setbacks occur its essential to take a minute, reflect inwards, and take time to accept the reality. That small space to reflect will give you the ability to put your full energy into finding what will work best for you. The other point I would make is to remain authentic to who you are. While there is great advice here on social media and building an online personal brand it's okay to not do "everything". Do what feels right for you!

As a new consultant working with a client, going in with real "meat" is the fastest way to build trust. Go research all you can about the company, look at who their investors are if private, and look up the entire executive team on LinkedIn. Read their website, if they are a tech company go look for repos on github. Then, focus on competitors and understand how they differ. From my experience, this makes the client feel like you actually care and are interested. Having knowledge in hand is powerful and sets the tone for how you will engage. Leverage this knowledge to ask questions. Too many consultants are afraid of asking questions. Learn to ask questions that showcase your intellect and research. This is a key job of a consultant.

In my experience, the main reason for a team's morale problems is due to challenging leadership and little visibility into impact. Start by reminding your team who your customers are and what value your company provides to their lives. When a team loses the image of the customer and the connected empathy, motivation, and quality quickly dissipate. For me, this has often looked like having a team all-hands meeting. In regards to leadership, no tools or tactics will help you lead if your team does not trust you. Do you give your team space for being vulnerable and making mistakes? It's about how you show up every day and how you engage with your team. Build and foster these qualities in your team by setting an example.

Being overwhelmed can come from several sources and the first step is to identify the cause is it due to an influx of issues, feelings of capacity crunch, or lack of clarity on strategy. From there you can start working on solving the problem. If its issue related setup a response plan for your team - get the issues documented clearly and get clear on the business impact. Sometimes issues may seem problematic but may not be having a real impact on the business. For capacity issues, my biggest suggestion is to double down on building an internal request process if you have not already done so. All new marketing requests that need marketing ops attention must hit the request form and will be triaged based on capacity.

Indispensable requires a clear image of what that means for you. From my perspective this means that my contributions are not only driving value to the organization but truly can't be duplicated by those around me. In marketing operations, my key advantages that I have developed are my speed and precision in coming up with solutions once warranted. This sounds good but its taken me a decade learning to spot patterns and implementing different architectures. Few in the industry can act quickly and percison especially with larger organizations with higher risks. The last tip is to start developing a working visual memory of as many different applications and solutions out in the market as possible. This pays off when problem-solving.

When I think about ROI I start with a model driven approach similar to how an investment banker may build a model for understanding the market value of a business. Start with the assumptions for the business and get a baseline model built. Then start adding in more complexities to your model to account for more variables. This gives you a starting point that allows you to start creating a conversation on ROI. If you go in with a mission trying to defend your existence as a unit you will often find that your analysis will be viewed with skeptisim. Instead, try to be a curious, data-driven, impartial observer while building. You always can shape the narrative with the truth and a functional model in hand.