Evan Patterson

When I start with a new tool, I check for: First-comment scheduling. Content approval. Repurposing to multiple formats. Design integration. Production tracking. Engagement monitoring. Copy-paste formatting. If I can't find these in ten minutes, they probably don't exist.

The traits that get you managed out of a corporate job are often the exact traits that make you exceptional working for yourself. The person who couldn't stop pointing out strategy inconsistencies is now running a practice where that instinct is the value.

Most founders treat content like a writing task. Draft it. Post it. Wonder why it's not working. The writing is rarely the problem. It's a workflow problem. Copy gets written, approved, needs design, sits in a folder, moment passes. Nobody owns the pipeline.

Most companies write once, post once, call it strategy. A senior marketer sees one good piece and extracts 5-10 distinct angles from it. Different hooks, different audiences, same thinking. You're treating content like it has one life. It doesn't.

If a feature is hard to find, you've hidden the value. Most companies bury proof under nav menus and positioning language nobody asked for. Nobody's asked: what does someone need to understand, in what order, to decide you're worth talking to? That's a leadership question.

A founder redesigned his website over a weekend because the brand "wasn't working." New colors, fonts, hero copy. The real problem? Positioning had drifted. The story didn't match reality anymore. New fonts won't fix confused thinking.

Autism and ADHD got me labeled "a lot" by every corporate employer. Too intense. Too blunt. Too focused on the wrong things. What they missed: that's not a flaw, it's a skill set. Pattern recognition. Hyperfocus. Zero tolerance for comfortable answers.

Met someone at a conference in 2019. We talked about boring B2B content for 25 minutes. No pitch. She wasn't even my target client. Two years later, she referred me. Most people underestimate reputation's timeline. You don't know which conversation matters or who's watching.

A lot of consultants call themselves "strategic." What they mean: give advice, not do things. That's just billing. Real strategy is saying no to good ideas. Saying yes to everything that makes sense in isolation is how budgets disappear.

Delivered everything on the list once. Client was stuck anyway. Deliverables optimize for completion, not impact. We both win the game we agreed to play—business doesn't move. Now I scope by outcome instead: What needs to be true? What decisions matter?

Series B hired a VP Marketing at $220K. Four months to find her, three to onboard. By month nine, friction. Month fourteen, she left. Eighteen months and hundreds of thousands later, back to square one. Sometimes you need full-time.

I need to cut this from 429 to under 280 characters while keeping the core insight and line breaks. Here's the aggressive cut: I'm often the first person in a room with no political incentive to tell a founder their marketing isn't working. The internal team knows.

Content without a clear demand objective is just noise. The brief said "build awareness." I asked: awareness of what, for whom, to what end? Long pause. "Just... get our name out there." Activity feels like progress. Publishing feels like doing.

The funniest lie corporate ever told us is that loyalty is rewarded. Baby, the company that laid you off in November had a holiday party in December. The bar had an open bar. You were not invited.

Walked into a company with perfect positioning docs, brand bible, the works. Sales team ignored it all. Nothing sounded human. The gap: strategy written for decks, not conversations.

Founders often handle all marketing because they can't find someone to trust it to. Content gets inconsistent. Messaging docs go stale. The website still says "we help companies grow." It's not negligence—marketing just loses to more urgent fires.

Founder posted great LinkedIn content for 8 months. Zero inbound. I asked what he wanted people to do. He said "reach out, I guess." Problem: his profile didn't say who he helps or what happens next. Content strategy ≠ growth system. One's a habit, the other's infrastructure.

The job description asked for 10 years of experience, a master's degree, and "startup hustle." The salary was $58,000. I actually respect the audacity. That's the most creative fiction I've read all year.

I have never once met a person who put "results-driven" in their bio who could tell me what the results actually were. Name one. I'll wait. I have snacks.

Some people have 15 years of experience. Others have 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. LinkedIn cannot tell the difference and neither can the recruiter who spent 6 seconds on your resume.