Finance meets marketing

I studied economics, and my first job was at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I earned a certificate in financial decision making while I waited to start the MBA program. I dreamed of being a trader or an investment banker. Then I fell in love with direct marketing.

I started out managing a $5 million budget for Booth’s Executive Education program. We invested heavily in direct mail, renting lists from publications like Harvard Business Review and mailing brochures to their subscribers at home. It was an amazing channel. I used to have nightmares that Harvard had cut us off.

The math that decides everything

We also ran Google Ads, and we’d pay over $50 every time someone searched “exec ed” and clicked. That sounds expensive, until you know the program cost $10,000 with mostly fixed costs. We could afford to spend up to $9,000 to win a student and still make money.

Then came LinkedIn ads, and I took those over too. For every channel we tracked signups and revenue and traced them back to ad costs. The channels and lists with the best numbers got more money. That habit never left me.

From Booth to a rocket ship

I left Booth because a startup I was moonlighting for, KeySmart, took off after I started running its ads. With Facebook ads, we went from about $5,000 a day in revenue to $25,000 within a week, and the company grew to around $35 million a year before I left.

While I was at KeySmart I started Discovery Marketing. Today we help professionals and local businesses tell their story, turn it into websites and video, and advertise it. And we keep a financial eye on every dollar, so you can see what each channel brings back, not just what it costs.