Job Description - Business Development

"Business Development" is such a vague term. I'm not even sure anybody that actually works in the field can clearly identify what it means - except for the fact that your job is to to help make more money for the business.

I spent 3 summers trying to find my "dream job." Marketing at Unilever was creative and enjoyable, but I soon learnt that I would be spending 365 days a year designing digital assets for skincare products - which made it less appealing. Assurance at PwC was what I thought I'd always wanted - prestigious, analytical, and rigorous. But when I look back at it, the only thing I actually liked about the role was the glamorous office and the expensive meals. By my third summer, I came to the conclusion that I simply cannot be doing the same thing everyday - I like fast moving environments, I get bored of things quickly, and I need new tasks to intellectually stimulate me.

In very simple terms, a social commerce agency sells products on social media and uses content to persuade people to buy those products. We work closely with social media platforms like TikTok and Meta, drive revenue for clients (the companies we sell products for), and take a commission of that revenue.

It would be difficult to explain what my day-to-day looks like, since there really is no "day-to-day." What I can break down though, is what my role looks like today, which can be defined as 3 main tasks:

• Moving rocks instead of pushing pebbles
• Putting out fires
• Growing the team

 

Moving rocks instead of pushing pebbles

There's fundamentally two ways in which you can grow the average agency business: engaging new clients or driving better results for current clients. On my first day at the job, my boss referred to this process as "pushing pebbles." His idea was that if the team invests time, money, energy, and resources into putting additional hours into new clients or existing ones - it would drive results and growth for sure, but at a slow pace. Instead, I was tasked with "moving rocks" - thinking strategically about how we can adapt the business model to give our company an economic moat (or competitive advantage) against every other social commerce agency.

This summer, I developed a new source of revenue for the business: The Creator Agency Partnership. I realized that our current model revolved around driving revenue for clients, but as a consequence - we'd worked with 1,900 social media content creators. Creators always have a demand for new brands to work with, and vice versa. Our business already had close relationships with brands, now all we had to do was to build those relationships with creators to be able to set them up with brands outside of our agency's ecosystem - almost like a matchmaking service, but with a "transaction fee."

A lot of my work to develop this was tedious and tiring. I spent hours on strategy documents, interviews with content creators, HubSpot and creator data, and effective mass outreach. We've finally enrolled close to 200 content creators & executed 3 successful campaigns - and I feel very fulfilled.

Putting out fires

As an early employee at a startup, you probably know more about the business than anybody else that was hired after you. Even though this isn't an official "task", a lot of my job is intervening when there's an issue and somebody else is unable to handle it.

What this looks like for me:

• Being called to work at 2 AM because a client's advertising account had a new feature that the media buyer had overlooked. Coming up with a game plan to recover 3 weeks of lost GMV.
• Having a client call added to my calendar three minutes before it's supposed to begin because an account manager is not feeling well. Having to wing said client call. Huge adrenaline boost.
  
• In class at 4PM, getting a call from by boss to be at the TikTok office in Culver City by 4:30 because "I need to be at this meeting more than he does."
  

Growing the team

Honestly, this has been the most difficult part of my job recently. We've needed to hire more people to grow out the Creator Agency business and this meant my colleagues and I had to execute an end-to-end hiring process. In the past 10 days, I've interviewed 19 candidates - and I'm not the most sure how to go about it. If even 15 of them have the skills and experience required for the job - there's several questions that arise. Who has the willingness and determination to do the best work? Who's the most interested in the space? Who's a good cultural fit & would actually want to work with us long term? And how am I supposed to know all of this from an hour long interview? Should I lead with data or should I lead with intuition?

• Passive Sentences: 0%
• Flesch Reading Ease: 62.6
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8.8