I went from working on a farm in a remote 2,000-person town in Oregon to founding a multilingual marketing agency in Hamburg, Germany. If I had to start over again, this is what I would do.
As a young girl, my first job was shoveling hay on a farm in my hometown, Joseph, Oregon.
At the time, I never imagined I would end up leaving America, let alone founding a marketing agency based out of Germany.
Here’s how I did it:
↳ Work at a farm (and other odd jobs growing up)
↳ Move to the big city for college (Portland)
↳ Get bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and English
↳ Travel to Spain for a study abroad program
↳ End up in Germany while backpacking solo
↳ Learned that everyone, including expats, can attend public university in Germany for free
↳ Apply for a master’s degree program in Hamburg
↳ Graduate college and move to Hamburg to learn German at a language school for 6 months
↳ Get accepted to study my master’s in Anthropology in Hamburg, and even start studying for 2 weeks
↳ To fully quality for the program, pass an incredibly rigorous university-specific German language test
↳ Fail the test (by 3 points), so I lost my student visa and had to drop out of university
↳ Germany didn’t recognize my US degrees, so didn’t qualify me to work there, either
↳ Go freelance as the only option to stay in the country
↳ Due to my German skills, found work as a content translator and SEO writer
↳ Learn SEO from my first clients
↳ Scale freelancing into an agency
Those last two points are a massive simplification, but if you’d like to get to where I am, there are many paths you could take.
So if I had to start over again, this is what I would do:
- Forget paying for a degree
Marketing changes too fast for a degree to be relevant. Anyway, nothing you learn will matter unless you’re applying it to real data in a real business. Everything I know about marketing, I learned from practical experience. Not to mention it would’ve saved me from a load of student debt.
- Get practical experience
I have taken every opportunity to work with people who would be willing to teach me and get paid to learn. Whether it be SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, or anything else that could come in handy later. This part came in especially handy for scaling out to an agency.
- Learn earlier on how to sell my skills
If you work in marketing, you know that showing marketing KPIs is just half the battle. The other half is how you communicate the value of marketing and your own skills, as well as how you build relationships with others around you. No matter whether you want to scale an agency, are a freelancer, or work in-house, put some serious dedication into learning how to communicate the value of what you do.
And that’s it!
When it comes to marketing, personal experience trumps formal education every single time.