People Don’t Believe My Boss Exists, Part 19

r/MyCEOisCrazy

Being the mid-pandemic, work-from-home, tech-reliant, depression-and-anxiety-riddled species that we are, seeing your phone light up with “1 New Message From Your Boss” and, in a matter of 1 minute, rack up to “14 New Messages From Your Boss,” is enough to give anyone flop sweats. You run through everything you’ve done recently– What did you forget? What could you have done wrong? If it doesn’t have to do with me, what happened?

With the spiral of thoughts ramping up in volume in my head, I pick up and unlock my phone to see…

Lol

[expletive]

Wait

I have to tell you

What the [expletive]

Girl I have to tell you

*begin rant about censorship in social media*

*switch to rant about how unintuitive the audience build feature is on some ad softwares*

Sigh

[Expletive] it, hours approved & fix it for me

How are you?

Going into meeting call later

*emoji*

*typo*

r/Annie

… It’s in these times I wish iMessage had a threading feature like Discord does so I can reply one by one to each message, which is its own separate topic. Annie is the kind of person that thinks in subthreads.

Now, obviously I know not everyone is like me. I’m fully aware my brain is just dancing on piles of coping skills while mental illnesses rain down from overhead. But I do believe that anyone would be, at the very least, a combo of some of these:

Anxious

Confused

Overwhelmed

Curious

And I’ll tell you… it’s a perfect embodiment of why I love my job at Rock Candy Media in Austin. At first glance, it seems chaotic– that’s because it is. But I kid you not, you haven’t seen a team thrive in chaos as much as the RCM team does.

The Key to Chaos

I can tell this is because brands that succeed, like our clients, need creativity. And creativity needs authenticity. And authenticity needs honesty. And work/life integration is the key. When you throw that storm together, you actually get a group of integrated marketing people that consistently expect the unexpected, strategize in new and creative ways, and nothing really shakes them.

For our clients, that means we can handle whatever baggage they’ve got. Zero data, botched development, gross design, neck-breathing investors circling like vultures — we got it. We know it. We handle it with you, and build your brand higher.

For our team, it means don’t hold back. Not in a “there’s no such thing as a dumb question,” kind of way. More like a “that’s a dumb question and I’ll tell you that to your face because I respect and expect better from you,” kind of way.

It’s the kind of environment where you’re allowed to explode in expletives if you’re frustrated or anxious on a project. Where if you’re going to be late because you slept through your alarm because your S.O. dumped you and you drowned your sorrows in too much wine the night before, tell the truth. And as overwhelming or unprofessional as that might seem, it’s comforting to the people that fit in here (which isn’t everybody).

The only thing that’s unspoken is that anything goes.

It’s the kind of audacity you need when trying to get a brand purpose or business off the ground. That’s how Annie did it a decade ago with the start of RCM, and that’s how she does it with client after client in industry after industry. 

Yeah, r/MyCEOisCrazy. But r/We’reAllMadHere, so it kind of works. End rant.