Change is good, right?

Back when I had a big team and an office, I used to get two things levelled at me.

The first one was “we need more padding”. It was true, my obsession for white space in emails was legendary, and I used to get ridiculed for it. Fair enough.

The second one was, every time I’d get back from holiday or even a long weekend, my team would joke “so Doug, are we ditching email and now doing (fill in the blanks)”. The blanks could be anything wildly random, cos I had a reputation for change.

It got to the point I became paranoid about this, and then started to force myself to ‘stick to the plan’, regardless of it working or not. But the reality is, my passion for change is what saw us through the sticky period during covid, and has meant I’ve manage to steer the ship around the iceberg, and not directly into it.

It’s funny, cos the Labour party’s new slogan is simply ‘CHANGE’, like it’s a positive thing. Cos of course… it is!

I’m kinda writing this post as a lesson and reminder to myself to regard change as a positive thing, and that without it, you are stagnant, and also boring, and no-one like boring.

I’m launching emailninja.com in a few short weeks, another example of change.

Since 2005 I’ve ran MailNinja, an email agency primarily focusing on supporting Mailchimp’s customers, however it became clear that to fully distance us from the chimp, we had to rebrand and become something new.

Back in 2009 I studied NLP, and there’s a presupposition that goes… ‘if you always do what you've always done you'll always get what you've always got’. This stuck with me to today, and probably made me prioritise change when I grew my business.

I’ve made many mistakes running my business, but to grow a small marketing agency in Swindon to become Mailchimp’s #1 partner, with a team of 11 people and monthly revenues of ￡40k+ is no mean feat and something I am proud of.

Of course, the downside of constant change is that you ditch stuff before it sees the light of day. For us, we started to build entire platforms, then decided it was crap so threw it in the bin!

I’m convinced my approach to change will be proved right and that emailninja will be the second chapter in my career.

Here’s hoping.

No... f to hope… I will make it so!

Doug, over and out.