By: Erik Huberman
Founder & CEO
HAWKE MEDIA
There’s no shortage of quotes and cliches regarding change. Albert Einstein said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” Winston Churchill said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Some random fortune cookie I had said, “Change is the only constant.”
These are all accurate. Who am I to argue with the likes of Einstein, Churchill, or fortune-cookie wisdom? But over the course of my career, I’ve started to shape my own definition of change.
I’ve dealt with change in every stage of my career. The most memorable moments of transition are tidal waves, and throughout my career, I’ve gone from getting sucked under to learning how to ride them.
When Change Happens to You
I started my career in real estate, which is a great industry where I could leverage several of my strengths. The only problem was I happened to kick off my career around 2008… Not exactly the best time to start to dabble.
As soon as I started work, the landscape changed in unprecedented ways. My saving grace in this wave of change was that I hadn’t been in the field long enough to have preconceptions about the “norms” of the industry. Sure, I was educated to prepare for a traditional marketplace, but entering the field without a true sense of the status quo forced me to recalibrate constantly and buckle up for the ride.
As most people do when they first start their professional journeys, I was struggling. When I look back, I’m not sure how I made ends meet. I was fully in survival mode, but my clients and customers didn’t know that. They saw a young professional who stayed optimistic and kept his head above water no matter the turmoil happening around him.
There aren’t a ton of reasons to look back at that era in my career with a lot of fondness, but it taught me I was adaptable. I didn’t realize it at the time because it was all happening so fast, but I was rolling with every punch for years. That was an unrivaled period of change for the whole country, but it taught me that change doesn’t have to drown me.
Learning I was adaptable to change was important early on, but I still had a long way to go in my relationship with change.
When You Are Part of the Change
In my subsequent professional pursuit, I wouldn’t be pushed around by a changing industry. Instead, I was going to be the change to shake up an industry. Think of it as the entrepreneur’s version of Ghandi’s “be the change you want to see in the world.”
I launched a clothing subscription service called Swag of the Month. As a real estate professional, I’d established my own name as a sort of brand, but this was my first time building a brand from scratch. I landed on this service because it was something I thought I could use. I’ve never wanted to put a lot of energy into my wardrobe, and a subscription-based service to keep my clothes fresh seemed like a hole in the market that I could fill. I didn’t have a background in the fashion industry, or even the ecommerce industry, at the time. But I had a unique perspective that could change those models.
The brand was successful for years – successful enough that the more prominent players the in fashion field got wise. After the success of Swag of the Month, more and more subscription-based clothing brands began to pop up, and established brands like Nordstrom were starting their own competitors to my product.
I’d been successful in changing the industry, but once again, change was happening fast around me. I knew I was adaptable, so I looked into ways my brand could evolve to keep pace, but the truth was, my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I’d accomplished what I set out to accomplish.
Of course, I was hesitant to sell off a brand that I had worked hard to build, but when the opportunity arose, I had to admit to myself that I needed the change personally and professionally.
My company was successful in changing the industry, but rather than trying to keep up with the continuing evolution that I’d help set in motion, I decided to take the capital from selling my company and start my next endeavor.
The lesson about change from this part of my career was the realization that change didn’t have to be something I always had to keep up with, but I didn’t have to drown from it either. If I leveraged it right, I could use change to my own benefit, whether professionally or personally. In this case… it was both.
When You Lead the Change
For my next endeavor, I swapped out D2C for B2B. I launched Hawke Media, a marketing brand with the goal of making great marketing accessible to all brands.
During my time in ecommerce, I noticed two things about most ad agencies. First, they only wanted to work with the biggest name brands they could find. They were concerned about building their own portfolio, not actually building my brand. Second, most of them were full of shit anyway. They pitched lofty ideas, not tangible results.
Hawke Media was created to be an answer to that frustration. We referred to ourselves as “Your Outsourced CMO” because we care about the success of our clients the way an internal hire would… but with lower costs and more flexibility.
By the time I was establishing the Hawke Media brand, I’d gotten a lot better at looking ahead and being prepared for change. I was even asked for an interview in the early days of Hawke about what I considered to be the biggest threat to the digital marketing model I was building. The interviewer proposed freelancers as a threat to the agency status quo. In my experience, freelancers were not nearly as reliable as the agency model. Companies wanted to hire marketing help that they could count on the way they could depend on their own employees. Freelancers would never match agencies in that regard, even if the freelancer structure evolved for the better.
I answered that artificial intelligence was the most significant potential threat to the current business model. AI is and was a certainty that would eventually impact every job, and marketing was no exception.
This was around 2015, so talking about AI replacing marketers still seemed far off, but check out industry news in 2023. The future is here.
The good news is that by forecasting that trend at the foundation of the company, I was able to not only prepare Hawke Media for the shift, but position us to lead the way. Shortly after that interview, we began development on AI technology that could advise on marketing strategy. Down the road, we collaborated with another company that created AI dashboards that would benchmark data industry-wide.
The blend of hard work, resources, and good luck led us to launch HawkeAI in 2022. This has completely changed how we measure and report analytics to our clients at Hawke Media. It’s also positioned us well as new AI technologies seem to roll out every day. AI is embedded in the workflows of every team member at Hawke Media, and its influence will only continue to grow.
Of all the “tidal waves” of changes that have taken place in my career, I’d argue none have been as impactful as artificial intelligence will be in the next several years. I view this as the ultimate example of something that is inevitable and will either propel businesses to the next level or sink them entirely.
Triumph Over Change
I am fortunate for the ways I got to learn from change through the early stages of my career. I learned that I was adaptable to change that it didn’t have to crush me. Then I learned I could actually leverage it to propel myself to my goals. And now I’ve learned that if you’re lucky enough to see change on the horizon, don’t stick your head in the sand. The better you can prepare yourself for change, the more likely you’ll be to pioneer innovation.
Bracing for change will ensure you don’t just survive in changing tides; you’ll thrive.
At this point in my career, I’m finally starting to develop my own perception of change. I agree with everything Einstein, Churchill, and all the other great minds have come up with, but it’s good to have my own definition.
Sometimes you can prepare for change, and sometimes it comes out of nowhere, but you can always utilize it to your benefit.
You’re more adaptable than you think you are. If you can roll with the punches of change, you can set yourself up for personal success and for professional domination against the competition.
